Butthole Surfers – ‘After the Astronaut’ album review: A long-lost 1990s album finally gets its revenge
After nearly three decades swirling around Butthole Surfers lore, the long-lost After the Astronaut album finally sees the light of day via Sunset Boulevard Records.
The Skinny: Its history was a fraught one. Off the back of their 1990s Billboard surge, a buoyant Butthole Surfers handed Capitol Records their finished After the Astronaut master in 1998, ready to unleash on the world. Yet, despite promo copies issued and artwork sorted, Capitol lost its nerve at the last minute and shoved the record in its vaults. Once the project was bought by Hollywood Records, a top-down demand for a more commercial product forced the band to rejig the material into 2001’s eventual Weird Revolution.
It was a sorry end to the Texan hardcore psychonauts’ gloriously fetid and outrageous punk tapestry, bogged with a nagging dilution and promoted by two dated time capsules of the era, the wincingly bad ‘The Shame of Life’ and ‘Dracula from Houston’. The extra kicker was that the skewed hip-hop and electronic slathering that mushed limply on Weird Revolution had been captured infinitely more potently on their abandoned LP.
So, After the Astronaut picks up where they left off, kinda. Having already soaked up some of the decade’s contemporary sounds on 1996’s Electric Larryland, the veer into samples, drum loops, and synth washes all foam and fizz with Butthole Surfers tang that Weird Revolution was so criminally robbed of. “We were using all the digital toys at our disposal at the time, and it felt much like the creation of Locust Abortion Technician,” drummer King Coffey recently reflected on the album’s press materials.
A comparison to their most unreined and chaotic LP gem from 1987, After the Astronaut certainly radiates a gleeful creativity sorely missing from its 2001 bastardisation. The fun that powered a chart topper like ‘Pepper’ hovers throughout. ‘Intelligent Guy’ sees frontman Gibby Haynes perform his signature nasal, baritone rap atop snarling hip-hop beats and an oozing bassline, with Leary’s uniquely disquieting guitar attack jabbing in and out. ‘Mexico’ cascades down a twisted tunnel of sampledelic trance, and the closest thing approximating folk rock scores the strangely wisftul ‘Jet Fighter’ and its attack on the US war machine.
Intrepid forays into relative pop friendliness are countered by the old Butthole Surfers’ taste for churning weirdness, however. While never touching on the nightmarish peaks of their 1980s output, After the Astronaut indeed wanders bizarre terrain like the title track’s fuzzed-out carnival implosion, all crackled with Haynes’ crunched and processed vocals. Trip-hop ambience haunts the swirling ‘Junkie Jenny in Gaytown’ with feverish hypnosis, but the album’s centrepiece madness is the penultimate track.
Echoing the audio capture of Locust Abortion Technician‘s ‘22 Going on 23’ collage, ‘I Don’t Have a Problem’ makes use of Coffey’s cell phone interceptor to scoop up real people’s dialogue and dipped in a bubbling vat of spectral keys and digestive electronics. ‘Jet Fighter’ may stand as the album’s heart, but ‘I Don’t Have a Problem’ sits queasily as After the Astronaut’s unsettled guts.
Thankfully, Leary’s dusting off of After the Astronaut’s old 24-track recordings prompted the guitarist to set about mixing the material as the Butthole Surfers had back in 1998, preserving the creative moment they were in and allowing the intended product to tell such a tumultuous chapter of the band’s story. It’s all the better for it. While fans may pine for their acid-fried mania that forged their legend, After the Astronaut rights serious wrongs after all these years and sits proudly as the Texan legends’ true eighth album.
Standout Track: ‘I Don’t Have a Problem’
The Verdict: Finally washing away Weird Revolution’s nasty aftertaste, After the Astronaut sets the Butthole Surfers’ creative record straight with a piquant window into the shifting sonic flavours during the tail-end of their 1990s Billboard splurge. Wielding hip-hop shuffle, sampling psych and teeming electronic gurgle, After the Astronaut points to where the Butthole Surfers could have artistically headed, while also serving as a fitting close to their chaotic waver between the punk underground and pop mainstream.
Release Date: June 26th, 2026 | Producer: Paul Leary | Label: Sunset Boulevard
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