Toronto psych-rock experimentalists LAMMPING return with “Never Never,” a full-tilt collaboration with Montreal rockabilly legend Bloodshot Bill, out May 6 via We Are Busy Bodies. The track supports their upcoming album Never Never, set for release on June 27, which marks the first installment of an ambitious four-album journey that will span genres, collaborations, and sonic time-travel over the next year.
After remixing Badge Époque Ensemble’s Clouds Of Joy album, Lammping’s Mikhail Galkin found himself re-immersed in the kind of sample-heavy hip-hop production he’d explored years earlier under the name DJ Alibi. Drawing on a style rooted in early ’90s East Coast rap but layered with live instrumentation and offbeat textures—somewhere between Pete Rock and The Avalanches—Galkin began blending those techniques into Lammping’s heavy psych-rock foundation.
The spark for Never Never came when the band reached out to Montreal rockabilly legend Bloodshot Bill, whose voice—gritty, elastic, and totally distinctive—felt like the perfect wildcard. The two had crossed paths over a decade earlier, and when Bill came to Toronto for a show, they booked a quick session. One track turned into three, and the album took shape around Jay Anderson’s breakbeat-style drumming, live jams, and flipped samples.
“‘Never Never’ was the first song that came out of this series of sessions, and it felt like a reset,” says Lammping producer Mikhail Galkin. “I was getting back into sampling, digging through records, pulling loops, then flipping them into songs. There are certain voices that always stood out to me. I always liked Bloodshot Bill’s voice and how he manipulates it and felt it would be a really cool instrument, so to speak, to feature on our stuff. It’s pretty harsh at times, but then he can drop it super low when needed. It generally has this animated feel.”
Originally built around a saxophone loop unearthed by bandmate Jay, the song became a springboard for collaboration. “I think the loop was kinda mischievous and rhythmically interesting, and it was recorded quite hot so it had a little bit of distortion. BB gravitated to it and used it as a springboard to write the song. He also shares a love of ’80s rap—when we were driving in his car, he had LL Cool J, Run DMC and Ultramagnetic MCs playing and all that, so it made sense that this project happened.”
Layer by layer, guitars, drums, and other samples were stirred into the mix, resulting in a gritty, genre-bending track that feels both chaotic and strangely cohesive. “I feel like BB is almost rapping on it,” Galkin adds, “but it still doesn’t become a hip-hop track. How weird the result became is what I love about the songs—I never get tired of it.”
Paired with a hallucinatory video directed and edited by Galkin himself, “Never Never” acts as a portal into the first chapter of Lammping’s upcoming 4 part series—a celebration of psychedelic music, hip-hop, the DIY punk aesthetic, and unfiltered creativity. It’s a record that doesn’t just reference influences, it inhabits them with total sincerity.