Various Artists – American Psychocandy – CS

Track Listing

1. Spare Snare – Just Like Honey
2. M.R.I – Living End
3. Long Stay Ultra Girls – Taste The Floor
4. Adam Void – The Hardest Walk
5. The Malibu Storks – Cut Dead
6. Hap A Damwain – Mewn Twll (In A Hole)
7. Hugh J. Noble and Jack Hayter – Taste Of Cindy
8. Tom Violence – Never Understand
9. Wayne Sha Bob And The Unteachables – Inside Me
10. Wio – Sowing Seeds
11. Ed Nolbed – My Little Underground
12. Mark Johnson – You Trip Me Up
13. Elton Wong – Something’s Wrong
14. The Loves – It’s So Hard

Notes

Here at Almost Halloween Time Records we’re celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Psychocandy with a tribute compilation. We’ve titled it American Psychocandy. That’s because we think that some records feel as though they were born to accompany a novel, even if they emerged in different eras and contexts. Psychocandy by The Jesus and Mary Chain and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho share the same subterranean vibration: a world where the surface is smooth, glossy, almost anesthetized, while underneath something unsettling churns and scrapes at the edges.

It’s a feeling that becomes even more vivid when filtered through the 2000 film adaptation starring Christian Bale, whose portrayal of Patrick Bateman is as polished and immaculate as a showroom stereo system—yet behind that flawless exterior, the character’s psyche hums with the same kind of dangerous feedback that defines Psychocandy. Bale’s Bateman, with his perfectly choreographed morning routine and his chillingly calm explanations of pop albums, could easily be imagined listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain alone in his apartment, letting the distortion seep through the cracks of his curated perfection.

Listening to Psychocandy today means entering a soundscape that sways between sweetness and violence. Nearly lullaby-like melodies dissolve into walls of feedback, as if someone had scratched a Beach Boys record until it bled. It’s an aesthetic of excess, of saturation, of noise becoming a form of emotional confession. The band takes pure pop music and hurls it into a blender of distortion, expressing a discomfort that doesn’t want to be explained clearly but wants to be felt on the skin.

In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman is exactly that: a man who inhabits a polished, perfumed, perfectly catalogued world, a universe of brands, restaurants, and suits that is almost pop in its obsessive aesthetic sheen. Yet behind this manicured order lies a constant noise, a mental static that grows like feedback ready to overwhelm the entire novel. Bale’s performance amplifies this duality: the immaculate surface and the chaos underneath. His violence is not only physical—it is the total distortion of reality through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, as if the world were filtered through an amplifier crackling toward self-destruction.

Psychocandy is here proposed in its entirety, reinterpreted by artists you already know as well as artists appearing for the first time on Almost Halloween Time Records and with whom it is truly an honor to work: Spare Snare, M.R.I, Long Stay Ultra Girls, Adam Void, The Malibu Storks, Hap A Damwain, Hugh J. Noble and Jack Hayter, Tom Violence, Wayne Sha Bob And The Unteachables, Wio, Ed Nolbed, Mark Johnson, Elton Wong, The Loves.

released December 10, 2025

Album credits

A tribute to The Jesus & Mary Chain “Psychocandy”
Words and Music originally by Jim Reid, William Reid

Mastered by Chris Foreman at SwampShack Studio in New Plymouth, New Zealand
Artwork by Luigi Falagario