exit-index

Grooms made a custom DbA guitar pedal for new LP 'Exit Index' (out today, listen)

Grooms’ new album Exit Index is out today. Made at the now-shuttered The Magic Shop (they were the last band to record there) with the same lineup as 2015’s great Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair, this is a further refinement of that album’s style: sleek, dark, alien. Slinky rhythms intertwine with heavily treated guitars and minor chord melodies. It’s a terrific record and you can listen to the whole thing below.

Frontman Travis Johnson is a co-owner of Death by Audio Effects and he designed a limited edition Exit Index guitar pedal to celebrate the new album:

I wanted to make a tremolo pedal to come out with the Exit Index because, almost randomly, there is a lot of tremolo used on it. I’ve barely used tremolo before but came across an old Fender Princeton amp with tremolo, given to me for free, and decided to record most of the guitars with it. The tremolo on it is noisy and interesting and I used it a lot but it made me think about how I hadn’t heard anything all that interesting done in a trem pedal in a while. It’s one of the oldest, simplest effects. So I decided to try and make something that involves tremolo but really pushes it in weird ways. I like weird, noisy, idiosyncratic effects, so I decided to use the noisiness of that Fender amp and give it more violence, almost like a Leslie, with lots of aggression and thump that can, but doesn’t have to, mangle the signal. It can make really angelic, pretty sounds and alien, harsh ones too. I hope people have fun with it.

There are only 157 of these Exit Index pedals (157 is also Exit Index‘s catalog number) — order yours — and you can watch a demo video where Travis shows you what it can do, below.

Grooms celebrate Exit Index with a record release party at Brooklyn Bazaar on Wednesday, October 25 with Russian Baths and Patio (tickets). You can watch a very Halloween-appropriate trailer for the show, below.