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Release date: September 25, 2026
Label: Peaceville
Genre(s): Post-punk
Scorpion Milk’s Flesh Masks For Skulls is a taut six-track EP that arrives barely a year after Mat McNerney’s acclaimed 2025 debut Slime of the Times. Releasing September 25, 2026 on Peaceville, it sharpens the project’s self-defined “apocalyptic post-punk”: danceable dread built from Killing Joke tension, anarcho-punk bite, and goth-metal decay.
McNerney, the British-Finnish songwriter behind Beastmilk’s Climax and Grave Pleasures, treats collapse as both poison and fuel. The four new originals — “Dreaming Skulls,” “Crushed Under The Weight,” and “Guilty By Default” — extend that vocabulary of end-times ritual. Titles alone evoke ritualized ruin and inherited blame; the music, from the evidence of the prior album and McNerney’s comments, favors brittle guitars, driving rhythms, and vocals that shift between sneer and incantation. “Crushed Under The Weight” stretches to five minutes, suggesting the EP’s most expansive moment of pressure and release.
The centerpiece is Ulver’s remix of “All Snakes No Ladders.” The Norwegian experimentalists expand rather than erase the original, amplifying Tor Sjödén’s drums and reframing the song so that returning to Slime of the Times reveals previously missed layers. McNerney called it a rare remix that actually deepens the source. A lo-fi video shot on phones during a U.S. tour—Vegas decadence, desert Starlink launches, a John Waters-related rebirth scene—matches the track’s surreal, handmade psychedelia.
Two covers close the set with pointed lineage. Gang of Four’s “What We All Want” and Devo’s “Gut Feeling” are recast in Scorpion Milk’s corrosive style, linking 1970s/80s post-punk and new-wave unease to the present’s automated nightmares. The EP functions as both continuation and interlude: urgent new material bookended by homage and transformation.
At roughly 25 minutes, Flesh Masks For Skulls does not overstay. It is doom you can still move to—clenched-teeth dancing while the world slimes over. For listeners who found Slime of the Times a rawer, angrier evolution of McNerney’s earlier work, this EP confirms the project’s momentum without waiting for a full second album. The scorpion, as Ulver put it, learns to dance when the wolves draw near.
Flesh Masks For Skulls is available for pre-order on vinyl and CD here.
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