Name: Dungeon Master
Brand: Gus Englehorn

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

SCR134LP

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Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

First Few Copies with a Bonus Fanzine.

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Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2022-04-29

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0680341346014

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

SCR134K7

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Rough Trade Exclusive: Yes

Tape

ROM DIRECT Ltd.

680341346045

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1 / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: Yes / Signed copies: No / Tape

SCR134CD

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0680341346021

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Gus Englehorn 

Genre GB

Alternative / Modern

Label GB

Secret City

Secret City Records is a Montreal-based independent record label and publishing company. With a label code of LC 30745, Secret City is dedicated to discovering and promoting talented artists from various genres. They provide a platform for musicians to showcase their unique sound and connect with music lovers around the world.
As an authoritative figure in the music industry, Secret City Records has built a reputation for releasing high-quality albums that resonate with listeners. Their diverse roster includes both established acts and emerging talents, ensuring a constant stream of fresh and innovative music.
With their commitment to supporting artists throughout their careers, Secret City Records offers comprehensive services such as artist development, marketing strategies, and distribution support. By fostering creativity and nurturing talent, they have become a trusted name in the independent music scene.

Before Montreal singer-songwriter Gus Englehorn was signed to Secret City Records he lived in a cabin in the woods and wrote Dungeon Master, the cutest, heaviest, strangest rock'n'roll record you will hear this year. Before he moved to the cabin he fell in love — in Salt Lake City, Utah - with a girl from Québec, whom he married one Friday the 13th. She would go on to become his drummer.

Before he met the girl - her name's Estée Preda by the way, she plays like Moe Tucker on salvia - Gus crisscrossed the globe as a world-class snowboarder. He shredded the gnar, he appeared in weird-ass videos, he made the covers of magazines and got sponsored by a company that manufactured sunglasses. 

But before that he lived in Hawaii - on a lava field, off the grid, with his parents and two brothers. And before that in Alaska - in a hamlet called Ninilchik, where his parents fished for salmon, and he and his brothers ate moose, and pizza, and played Nintendo, and also pretended to be wizards. All normal. All ordinary. "Dog dreaming of being a man / and a man dreaming of being a dog," Gus Englehorn sings. "Run rabbit run!" 

What's important to know is that for almost all of Gus's life - while he was getting bullied on the Big Island, while he was gleefully nonsenseboarding, while he was down in a basement groping for chords - he dreamed of being a songwriter. If he couldn't be Dylan maybe he'd be Daniel Johnston - or Frank Black and The Pixies or maybe Darby Crash and The Germs. And when he finally emerged - first on 2020's Death and Transfiguration and now here, on the 34-year-old's label debut - the sound he had found was dark and delightful, fun and demented, packed with dynamics and the chug of a hysterical guitar. 

"Me voilà!" Gus declares mid-way through the throws of "The Gate," announcing the arrival of a singer who can coo and howl and snarl with his eyelashes fluttering. Dungeon Master is an outsider opus that sparkles with its Dada spirit - that playful juxtaposition of isolation, alienation and a mildish case of OCD. "I let my subconscious do the driving," Gus admits, and as you listen to these 10 tunes it's difficult not to do the same: to sit back like a dog with a two-legged daydream; like a fisherwoman with her net; like a snowboarder with a mouth full of powder. 

Englehorn's electric visions are studded with synths and strings and manic pixie backing vocals, but at the heart of it is he and Estée's gnashing guitar and drums, turning the singer's darkest material – like on the stomping, paranoid "Tarantula," or the chapped and pleading "Exercise Your Demons" – into blasts of catharsis. Dungeon Master is deeper than a cellar, blunter than a club — a shivering introduction to an artist who's finally, fervidly arrived.

Dungeon Master

Music GB

Discover Dungeon Master by Gus Englehorn on vinyl, tape, and CD. This Rough Trade exclusive, limited edition release from Secret City Records is a dark and delightful rock'n'roll opus that showcases the artist's unique vision.