Dirtnap Records will publish the first installment of Beacon Comics this Spring, packaged with a 7″ record featuring a taste of Direct Hit’s (Milwaukee, Fat Wreck Chords) dubiously-forthcoming album (“Wasteland”), and new Decent Criminal (Santa Rosa, Diisd/Gunnar Records) songs “Time” and “Dream” – each an alternate take, and a B-side off their forthcoming album, respectively.

At some point during quarantine – with an album of new material shelved, and a month-long European tour all but canceled – Direct Hit singer/songwriter Nick Woods found himself working on a story about the future.

‘I’d get on video calls with my friends Dylan [Brown] and Jenny [Lapham], and we’d joke about being locked up with nothing to do – just like everyone else was,’ he says. ‘At some point, I got it into my head that this was all training for some kind of future where virtual reality would be the only way to experience the universe. And since I had nothing else to do at the time, I figured I’d start writing some of that stuff down.’

Together, Nick, Dylan, and Jenny – along with long-time Direct Hit collaborator and illustrator Walker Dubois – pieced together the first half of BEACON from Woods’s notes, producing a science fiction comic about a person named Doro, and their robot caretaker Partner, as civilization is reborn from apocalypse.

“Wasteland” was a tune I wrote and recorded by myself in a couple hours in June of 2020, a couple months after we canceled all our scheduled shows, and right around when I admitted to myself that I wasn’t gonna be able to be in a full-time band for a while,’ Woods says. ‘This was also right after when George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. So I was angry, and depressed, and embarrassed, and felt like I had to do something to express that mindset, and show some solidarity. The original version is really nasty-sounding – this one is too, but a lot more listenable.”

“Neither of our songs on this split were recorded with the intention of being used,” adds Decent Criminal singer/songwriter, Tristan Martinez. “I don’t even think we were supposed to be on it. But we are, and we’re happy to be a part of it. ‘Dream’ is from the same batch of songs we used for our new record, ‘There’s More To It Than Climbing’, but didn’t make the cut. And ‘Time’ at this speed was an idea Brian had with like 3 hours left of studio time. Both were recorded in the same 12 hour period.” 

‘Both our bands have been listening to Dirtnap releases for a long time, but the music we write has never really fit the catalogue,’ Woods concludes. ‘But these are weird times. We wanted to do something together that wouldn’t conform to pre-COVID rules about how records should be released and promoted. And Dylan, Jenny, Walker and I had the first part of this book lying around. So we figured it was good a time as any to try something far-out, with a label that wasn’t scared to experiment.”

This lavishly packaged comic/7” combo is a one time only pressing of 500 (300 on black, 100 on red, 100 on blue) and will only be available for a limited time. Get yours today!