Exsanguinated Roommate :: Fundamental Skills

Glen Johnson, the quiet architect of Piano Magic, isn't on this record, and there's no reason he should be. Yet in "Servant", the track that opens it, he has a place of his own: the ghost butler who knows the house well enough to move through it in the dark.

The name came first, then the band. Paul Foreman has said that "Exsanguinated Roommate" was the title of an imaginary horror film lifted from Jon Wurster's comedy routines, chosen to house the songs that belonged neither under his own name nor to Salisman, the Chicago group he shares with Chris Tate and drummer Jon Raedeke. Two albums followed in as many years, Lurking in February 2024 and Healing Trends in August 2025, both on Cruel Nature, the label Steve Strode has run from Northumberland since 2013, issuing underground music in small runs of cassette and vinyl. The route from a spare room in Chicago to a tape label in the north of England is among the project's least conspicuous facts, and it says a good deal about where this music lives now.

The method, too, has something domestic about it. Lurking was mixed by Tate and mastered by Carl Saff; most of it took shape on Foreman's home setup, save two songs cut at The Embryos' studio, and Foreman has described the process as having no specific rules. Reviews of the first two records drew on the same short list of names (80s pop-rock, the Flaming Lips, Mersey psych, King of Limbs-era Radiohead) and on the word "Anglophilic", repeated like a nervous tic. Fundamental Skills keeps every one of those references and deals them out in a new order.

Released on 2 October 2026, the six-track EP is billed by the label as a stopgap: a third album apparently already exists, and "for now they offer six new tracks on an EP". The same notes, written in the voice of two friends updating their answering-machine message, report what the pair have been listening to lately: Raedeke to his "old, battered drum kits", Foreman "obsessed with lesser-known Neil Young material and a 70s soft rock band called Christie". Christie are the band behind "Yellow River", a 1970 single. The reference could be a joke, an alibi or a method, and on an Exsanguinated Roommate record it tends to be all three.

"Servant" opens on subdued keyboards that recall the library music of Italian television drama in the 1960s and 70s, the sceneggiati, music written to sit beneath the picture. Over them, a hushed voice etches one of those difficult balances in which beauty refuses the easy consolation of harmony.

"A Rush Is Not a Rush" returns to the same crossroads and cuts straight through them, with distorted guitars and the kind of arpeggios Depeche Mode built a sound on. The chorus springs a flute straight out of Jethro Tull, while the voice, lucidly beautiful, leads back to Radiohead. "Sweet Joni" carries the weight of its dedication, which strips it of many possibilities before it has begun. It is the most immediate track here, drawn with a light touch, its arrangements closer to what the song asks of them.

"Cloakroom" keeps the tension low: prog played with the gait of an 80s new wave band, and with the same sense of restraint. "Compliance" is the record's most oblique moment. Percussion closes in around a drone while bass, piano and guitars probe a clean, almost domesticated feedback that wears its age honestly. It sits where an interlude would, and seems content to be one. "Until the Dawn" closes by swerving into the seventies, a ballad with pop-rock inflections: the direction the Christie and Neil Young obsession had signalled from the label's first announcement.