Ingrid Marie Jensen reports from Warmduscher’s Halloween bash at Austin’s Hotel Vegas.

According to urban legends and my cousin Dan, Hotel Vegas used to be a brothel. But that was a long, long time ago—like, maybe a hundred years, back when you could ride a horse through town without being ticketed, back when a loaf of bread cost a nickel, and the price of gas wasn’t a factor at all. Upstairs at the legendary East Austin music venue, the legends of the past are a tangible presence and the misty divide between then and now seems a delicate veil indeed. The space, which has been transformed into a makeshift dressing room for visiting bands, feels cloistered and intimate, like an E J Bellocq photograph of Storyville. But today there are no brocade fainting couches or satin shoes kicked hurriedly off beneath them. Instead, the rooms are stuffed with boxes of Christmas lights and crates of liquid supplies for the bar downstairs, stacked ceiling high. There’s also a towering mountain of musical gear, because did I mention? Warmduscher are back in town and filling Hotel Vegas with their signature effervescent chaos.

Founded in London in 2014, Warmduscher are a near-lethal cocktail formed from members of Childhood, Fat White Family and Paranoid London (their current line-up is composed of Clams Baker III, Marley Mackey, Ben Romans-Hopcraft, Adam J Harmer, Quinn Whalley and Bleu Ottis.) The band have just arrived in Austin from Arizona, a journey of over a thousand miles that necessitated two days of being trapped in a van, with Clams and the band’s tour manager, Jon, taking turns at the wheel. The dressing room is a circus of pent-up energy and bags of dirty laundry.

Warmduscher have been on the road touring their fourth album, At the Hotspot since 2022. Nearing the end of a touring circuit spanning more than 300 performances in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, they’re running on pure adrenaline. Along their travels, they’ve garnered legions of new fans with their punchy, chaotic, sonic overload of rock n’ roll, perfectly melded to tight little slice-of-life tales written with a sense of humor and pathos and populated with characters that read like Raymond Chandler on an unholy speed-and-tequila-fueled bender. Album number five is hovering on the horizon; it’s a golden time to be a Warmduscher fan.

I peer out of the dressing room window at the audience gathering at the outdoor stage in anticipation of the show. It’s Halloween weekend, and the crowd is composed of an assortment of Barbies, cowgirls, Pamela Andersons, Tommy Lees, and dinosaurs, with at least one Abraham Lincoln and one lobster in the mix. It’s a bizarre sight, but then Warmduscher are perfectly at home in the realm of the surreal, and a holiday weekend suits their artistic sensibilities; laissez les bon temps rouler being an apt summation of their manifesto.

It’s show time. Civilian garb is exchanged for matching black boiler suits, and they hit the stage, kicking off with their set with “Big Wilma,” a deliriously fast-paced rocker about a call girl who kills her clients with a switchblade. The audience erupts into cheers. Marley Mackey stands tall behind a trio of stacked keyboards, obscured in a haze of Marlboro smoke. The stage light cuts through the gloam of the Texan twilight, giving him an intense, mystical glow. Bleu Ottis thrashes at the drums maniacally, blond hair flying, mouth open in a silent scream as Ben Romans-Hopcraft pounds out an irresistible bass groove and Adam J Harmer churns out power chords. Warmduscher shows are interactive experiences, and by the second song, Clams jumps into the crowd, inviting them to join in with a remarkable generosity.

Modern life involves a lot of waiting around, but Warmduscher don’t believe in wasting time. This hyper-awareness that the big moments in life are not hovering on the horizon but in the room with you all the time, waiting to be seized, imbues their shows with a heady, ecstatic freedom that defies categorization. The band invite you out of the cloistered, dusty waiting rooms of your 9-5 mind, and into the Dali side of extreme. Whether you’re looking for God or a mosh pit, go get tickets to see Warmduscher, the A-Team of rock n’ roll. No one else does it better.