Misfits American Psycho vinyl reissue lands in three-colour pressing

There is something almost perversely fitting about the Misfits American Psycho vinyl reissue arriving in a slab of Orange, Red and Black: three colours that feel torn straight from the album’s horror-pulp aesthetic. The 1997 record, the band’s fourth studio album, will see a new pressing released on 13 November, formatted as a 1LP gatefold on a tri-colour Orange/Red/Black pressing.

What the Misfits American Psycho vinyl reissue includes

The reissue is not a straight port. It carries the bonus track ‘Dead Kings Rise’ alongside an additional hidden track, ‘Hell Night’, giving collectors something beyond the familiar eleven-song running order. The new pressing has been mastered by Levi Seitz at Black Belt Mastering, a detail worth noting: mastering for vinyl from a 1990s major-label source tape requires considered decisions about dynamic range and frequency that can substantially alter how the record sits in the groove.

American Psycho is best remembered for ‘Dig Up Her Bones’, which became one of the band’s most recognisable tracks, but the album itself represented something more structural for the Misfits. It was the first to feature vocalist Michale Graves and drummer Dr. Chud, a line-up shift that brought new creative pressures and possibilities to guitarist Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein and bandleader and bassist Jerry Only.

Jerry Only on the creative collision behind the record

In a 1997 interview with Lollipop Magazine, Only was candid about how that difference in reference points shaped the album. ‘Michale listens to Bauhaus and a whole bunch of bands I’m not in touch with at all,’ he said. ‘That gives him a different angle for songwriting, a different spice to add to the meal. I’m kinda dead-set in my ways, and I don’t use any outside influences. While I’m a huge fan of Iggy Pop, and I like the Ramones, and I used to like Generation X, I try to write only songs that come to me, without letting them be influenced by what else is going on.’

The domestic detail Only offered in the same conversation is, in its own way, as revealing as anything about the music. ‘I’m also really influenced by my kids. Like, they didn’t like a lot of the old stuff we used to play, so they wouldn’t let me listen to the box set. But the good thing is, they like the new album, so I’m starting to be a hero around the house, which is good after all these years.’ The image of one of punk’s foremost architects of the macabre quietly lobbying for approval in his own kitchen has a warmth the Misfits’ imagery rarely lets through.

Only also used the interview to articulate what he saw as the durability of the band’s subject matter, an argument that has only grown more coherent in the years since. ‘Honestly, I think our sound is truly original. And I think the subject matter is very important. When you look through entertainment history, many of the landmarks were science fiction. It all comes down to the imagination. There is no right or wrong, just a plot relying solely on the writer’s imagination and the director’s effects. Black Flag sung about the cops, and about social problems that come and go. In the ’60s, everyone was singing about the war. One day there won’t be any wars. But there will always be “Astro Zombies.”‘

It is a polemical position, and a coherent one. Where topical punk dates, horror mythology does not. American Psycho sat in an odd commercial moment, major-label punk was everywhere in 1997, and the Misfits’ particular strand of B-movie dread was not obviously fashionable, yet the record has endured precisely because its concerns are timeless in the way Only described.

For those wanting to hear Levi Seitz’s new master, the Misfits American Psycho vinyl reissue is due on 13 November in the tri-colour gatefold edition.