Bass Drum of Death

One drum, one guitar, one man

Bass Drum of Death started in 2008 as a practical solution to a shortage of personnel. Barrett played a bass drum and a guitar at the same time, which is where the name comes from, and he recorded the project's first two albums by himself. The debut, GB City, arrived on 12 April 2011 through Fat Possum, with vinyl handled by Inflated Records.

The reach came quickly for a one-man operation working out of north Mississippi. There was a television slot on Fuel TV in April 2011, a booking at Triple J's New Beginnings festival in Australia in 2012, and a set at Rock en Seine in France. By then the thing Barrett played on stage had grown past the original rig into a touring band of two guitarists and a drummer, which is roughly the shape it has kept ever since.

Innovative Leisure, Rip This, and the stop

Early in 2013 the band signed to Innovative Leisure and put out two records in sixteen months. The self-titled Bass Drum of Death came on 25 June 2013; Rip This followed on 7 October 2014 and marked the first time anyone other than Barrett played on a Bass Drum of Death release, with drummer Len Clark on the kit. The touring widened in step — American and European runs, and a first Brazilian show in August 2014.

Then it halted. In May 2015 the band announced a hiatus over personal matters, and the return was a single date: 5 September 2015 at the Made in America festival in Philadelphia. Barrett spent the following stretch finishing a fourth album largely on his own terms, and Just Business came out on 27 July 2018. It is the record that the band themselves now treat as the start of a wrong turn — an attempt at a cleaner, more broadly palatable version of the sound.

A brother, a lockdown and Patrick Carney

The next move brought family in. A 7-inch single appeared on Muscle Beach Records featuring Barrett's brother Jim, cut during the Covid lockdown, and Jim has been in the band since.

Say I Won't landed on 27 January 2023, back on Fat Possum, with Patrick Carney of The Black Keys producing. It pushed further towards melody and hooks than anything before it, and the critical read in hindsight has not been kind: the view now is that Just Business and Say I Won't were two goes at the same misjudgement. A live album, Live... and Let Die, followed on 8 June 2024, drawn from a Chicago performance recorded in April 2023 — a document of the thing the band have always done more reliably than studio reinvention.

SIX, or what it sounds like in his head

The sixth album is called SIX, which sets the tone. The method went back to where the first two albums came from: demos built in GarageBand, except this time all three members — Barrett, his brother Jim on guitar, Ian Kirkpatrick on drums — worked on the demos together, in sessions at Barrett's home studio in Nashville. Jeremy Ferguson, who has worked with Cage the Elephant and White Reaper, then took the band into his Battle Tapes studio for ten days in January 2025 to tighten the recordings without scrubbing the dirt off them. Mixing and mastering ran through March, and the record came out on 12 September 2025, running a little over half an hour.

Barrett has been blunt about the intent. "We're six records in, we don't need it to be clean for radio. I want it to sound like it does in my head," he told Glide Magazine. On the writing, he described the aim as "taking pop song structures and dirtying them up as far as we could push it", and singled out Do Nothing as the track closest to that edge. He was also candid that the collaborative part is new ground: "I'm still learning how to work with other people on songs I'm coming up with, so it's a learning process."

Reviews treated it as a correction. Spectrum Culture scored it 75% and framed it as a decision to go back to first principles after years of trying to be palatable, picking out Never Gonna Drink About You for pairing queasy guitar with an anthemic hook, Day Late Dollar Short for its Led Zeppelin lean, and the closer Night Ride for a drift towards The Cult and The Cars. mxdwn noted the guitars pushed to the front and allowed to feed back, calling the result less polished and more direct than the records either side of it. The press framing named The Stooges and ZZ Top as reference points, which is fair on the evidence.

Autumn 2026

The SIX touring cycle has been long rather than intense, and it has not stopped. Setlist.fm has logged 37 Bass Drum of Death concerts in 2026 so far. There was a summer run through the American midwest and west — Off Broadway in St Louis on 19 July, Zebulon in Los Angeles on 25 July, the Constellation Room at The Observatory in Santa Ana the following night — and the band are in Europe as this is written, having played Ratinger Hof in Düsseldorf on 1 October, Merleyn in Nijmegen on 2 October and Rotown in Rotterdam on 4 October.

The remaining European leg runs John Dee in Oslo on 6 October, a Stockholm festival slot on 7 October, Beta in Copenhagen on 8 October, L'Ampérage in Grenoble on 15 October, Upload in Barcelona on 19 October and the Wurlitzer Ballroom in Madrid on 20 October. The band then go home and keep going: Proud Larry's in Oxford, Mississippi on 30 October, DC9 in Washington on 2 November, Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia on 3 November, Baby's All Right in Brooklyn on 5 November, Warehouse XI in Somerville on 6 November, Phantom Power in Millersville on 7 November, Rumba Cafe in Columbus on 9 November, and the Blue Room at Third Man Records in Nashville on 28 November. Gnarcissists and Spirit Ghost each take a support slot on the run.

The venue sizes tell the honest story — club rooms, several of them small, booked across two continents by a band in its eighteenth year with no interest in scaling down the frequency. Barrett has acknowledged the cost of it plainly: "I've got a wife and dog at home now, so it's tough to leave them for extended periods."

What happens in the room

The 2026 sets have settled into a workable shape without becoming fixed. The average set logged across the year runs sixteen songs, and the fixtures are consistent: Nerve Jamming opens most nights, Get Found closes the main set, Crawling After You has shown up at or near the end of every tracked show, and No Demons is the encore when there is one.

What has changed is the balance. SIX material has taken proper residency rather than being wedged in — Do Nothing, Never Gonna Drink About You, Phantom Drip, Pick 'Em Up and Put 'Em Down and Night Ride all appear regularly — sitting alongside the GB City-era songs the band have never been able to leave out. Shorter nights happen: the St Louis set on 19 July ran nine songs, the Los Angeles and Santa Ana sets a week later ran thirteen apiece. Nothing about the staging is elaborate. It is three players, a lot of volume, and a set built to run without pauses.