Since their 1988 debut – the rip-roaring Sub Pop single “Touch Me, I’m Sick” – Mudhoney have consistently delivered the caustic fusion of punk, hard rock, and psychedelia the world needs and deserves, and Plastic Eternity is a new height in their vast discography.

The recording of Plastic Eternity delivered several firsts for the band. With Maddison planning on moving his family to Australia, Mudhoney was forced to work on a deadline, booking nine days at Crackle & Pop! in Seattle with longtime producer Johnny Sangster. Since the pandemic had made it impossible for them to convene in their practice space for nearly a year and a half, this meant they were going in to make a record with an assortment of half-forgotten riffs and nascent ideas rather than fully-fledged, well-rehearsed songs.

This was unusual for a band used to writing songs by “standing in a room and looking at each other and playing,” says Arm. “We had the time and space to think about things as we were doing them, and to make a kind of course correction—to use a fucking terrible cliche.” They built “Flush the Fascists” around a looping synth line, broke out a harmonizer on two tracks, added a vocoder to “Plasticity,” and even created a protest song out of a spontaneous jam on “Move Under,” the chorus of which Arm calls “something the Runaways might have come up with if they were us.” “Undermine the foundations/ Of the lies that they repeat,” implores Arm on the chorus. “You gotta move under/ Until it all comes down.”

Plastic Eternity also marks the first time Mudhoney has given writing credit to anyone outside the band, thanks to Sangster, whom Arm calls “a brilliant musician and way more adept at musical theory than any of us,” stepping in at times to offer advice on where the songs could go.