The 2024 election cycle did a number on all of us. And that includes Boo Dudes, Nashville’s kayfabe kings of Halloween and aptly self-described occult contemporary fright rock band.
Cast your mind back through the howling wind and driving rain to last spooky season, when guitar wolf Ghastly Mike Hackenslash and bassmummy Jesse Boo were going head-to-head in the election for supreme leadership of Cancelvania, the home of all canceled entities to which they had been banished. In a shocking turn of events, the toad population of Cancelvania — seemingly emboldened by the pro-toad propaganda buried in the Dudes’ 2024 release Toad/Retoad — turned out in force and, uh, elected themselves. Boo was forced to abdicate and flee; Hackenslash, whose physical and mental health remains in question after his 2023 re-reanimation, was allowed to stay.
In the meantime, superproducer Bloody Buddy Pearlman’s son Aiden has followed in his father’s footsteps in manipulating the Dudes for his own benefit … sort of. Aiden has manifested a cruel AI consciousness that calls itself AI-Den, which is working to drive the toads and their “croak” ideology out of Cancelvania and usher in “a new epoch of digital supremacy where monsters and computers will work together to destroy the haters in Cancelvania — and all other organic life, for that matter.”
To this end, AI-Den gave the Dudes’ pal Tad Dracula “a lot of drugs and money” to produce the “grimmest, most inhuman Boo Dudes album yet,” based on demo tapes recovered from the trash bag that contained Ghastly Mike’s carcass. This yielded Hardwired… to Scare a Crow, a synth-heavy record that runs the gamut from the New Order-esque “I Synth on Your Grave” and “Skeleton Dog” to the Devo-inspired “Running From the Robots” and the hardcore blast-beat synth-funk of “Fight the Pro-Gram.”
Dunno about you, but it feels like Tad kinda subverted AI-Den on this one and just made a straight banger, took the money and ran. (Shh, keep that to yourself.) A collection of outtakes and remixes called Phat Tad’s Premium Cuts dropped this week, giving a smidge more credence to that theory (while not providing any more encouraging updates on Ghastly Mike’s health).
The band appeared, at least on video, to share some Hardwired tunes during the Belcourt’s 12 Hours of Terror. No personal appearances have been announced as of this writing, but who knows — it’s Friday, it’s Halloween and strange things might happen if you stare into the bathroom mirror and say “Bloody Buddy” three times. Follow Boo Dudes on InstaGRIM throughout the year to keep up with their ongoing saga.
