It's a bit mind boggling to think that this is the first Street Sects record in seven years. Maybe I already have a distorted view of the passage of time, but it really does feel like yesterday that End Position put Street Sects on the map as a promising industrial band, meanwhile that album is now less than a year away from its one decade anniversary. Maybe it's also the fact that since The Kicking Mule, the band has kept some sort of a presence, releasing sporadic singles/EPs like Gentrification V: Whitewashed, or guesting on other albums like DISCO4 :: PART II. It's only now that I realize both these examples happened in 2022, but they were enough for me to keep Street Sects in my brain's cache despite the lack of a full length.
The first thing to note is that this is practically not the only Street Sects to drop, as on that exact same release day the band also dropped another album under the name Street Sex, with the necessity of its status as a side project brought by the band going full synthpop/darkwave on that record. With their more melodic and danceable demons exorcised on Full Color Eclipse, it leaves Dry Drunk to be the more vicious, violent, and noisy of the two, walking back on the more melodic noir-inspired sounds of The Kicking Mule and Rat Jacket towards something that's more in line with the sound that the band exploded with on End Position.
That isn't to say that Street Sects' sound isn't at all melodic, considering that about half of the vocals are clean vocals that have an alternative edge to them, or that there aren't plenty of moments where the synths go into either an ambient direction or a slightly more melodic one. But all of it has either a vile layer of noise added on top or has such a harsh industrial coldness to its tone, so even at its most melodic Dry Drunk feels inhospitable, and that's not even going into the crime ridden stories in the lyrics, the sound alone is rabid enough. Stark as the contrast is between the harsh side and the more melodic side, and shocking as each transition between the two is, it's still laudable how Street Sects don't make that seem disjointed.
While noisy albums can feel overwhelming by being dense, Dry Drunk does so by being really hostile.
