Livelick by Something Is Waiting

From Chicago, Illinois, Something Is Waiting announces the October 24th release of Livelick on Learning Curve Records.</p><br>

Recorded at a headlining show at the world-famous Empty Bottle in Chicago in 2023, Livelick captures one entire Something Is Waiting set, start to finish, with absolutely no edits or overdubs.

Leave it to Something is Waiting to release a live album in 2025. Always the outlier, Something Is Waiting has once again gone against the grain. In an era where live content has been exponentially devalued, thanks to an endless flood of casual phone clips, Something Is Waiting has chosen to deliver an official, old-school live album, in the tradition of the greats, from Bob Seger's Live Bullet to Pantera's Official Live: 101 Proof.


Skating a line between noise rock and heavy metal, Something Is Waiting is the primary purveyor of its own self-proclaimed genre, "nu roll" – described by Invisible Oranges as "glam-infused noise rock" and by Kerrang! as "the shrieky, sleazy, crust- glam you crave."

Hard, nasty, and weird, Something Is Waiting carves its own strange path, explained accurately by The Chicago Reader with these words: "On their first few releases they focused on big, mean, chaos-bringing noise rock a la Unsane. Over the past few years, though, they’ve charted a new direction, trading in nihilistic bludgeoning for Sunset Strip swagger forged with a sonic sledgehammer of '90s metal... A bizarre hybrid of White Zombie and Guns N’ Roses, pairing high-gloss metallic guitar with [vocalist Eddie] Gobbo’s shrill, confrontational shrieks."

To complicate matters further, Gobbo is a wildly creative lyricist who conjures surreal scenarios with the euphoric wordplay of a Beat poet. His critiques, pointed at an array of targets, from the music industry to society at large, are thick with sarcasm and pop culture references, and his lyrical style takes more from rap than it does from AmRep.

Initially a quintet, Something Is Waiting operates as a trio now, consisting solely of Gobbo, drummer Idin Alexzander, and guitarist William T. Fay. Livelick captures this 3- piece lineup, absolutely dominating in the live setting. Livelick reveals Something Is Waiting to be a lethally tight live band, replicating its album sounds faithfully and rocking with steamroller energy. Gobbo howls and prowls with utter conviction; Alexzander pounds with power and grace; Fay does the work of three musicians, using a custom live rig to create ripping lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and bass sounds.

The Livelick setlist consists of all eight songs from 2023's Absolutely album, plus one song from each of the two preceding albums – 2019's Songs from the Sally Beauty Pavilion and 2016's The Something Is Waiting Band. The live soundboard audio was mixed by engineer (and former SIW bandmate) Pete Grossmann at Bricktop Recording (Weekend Nachos, Frail Body). In addition to the audio, the entire set was immortalized on video, with video editing handled by mastering engineer Blake Bickel (Bronson Arm).

Says Gobbo: "We began at a time when singles and YouTube clips began usurping full length LPs and actually going to see the band live. We hated that. Sadly, that was the tip of an iceberg and it’s actually gone more in the other direction since. But we haven’t flinched. This is not a studio project. This is a live band. We make studio records in order to get new ammo for our live show. We want people to listen to our shit in order to ultimately come see us live."