Firewater returns with new album ‘Bad Jazz’ after 14 years
Firewater release ‘Bad Jazz’ via Pravda Records on December 11, 2026, their first album since 2012’s ‘International Orange!,’ with Jennifer Charles.
New York musical collective Firewater will release ‘Bad Jazz’ through Pravda Records on December 11, 2026, their first studio album since 2012’s “International Orange!.” The album arrives on 12-inch vinyl LP, CD, digital download and streaming services.
Tod A, the band’s founder, singer and bassist, recorded the album at Space Mountain, a studio in the foothills of Spain’s Sierra Madre mountains built by Martin “Youth” Glover, a founding member of Killing Joke. “The main band was a trio,” Tod A said of the sessions, which also brought in longtime collaborators: Oren Kaplan of Gogol Bordello on electric guitar and Firewater drummer Yoni Halevy on drum kit, percussion and backing vocals. Jennifer Charles of Elysian Fields duets with Tod A on the track “Winter’s Coming On.” Touring guitarist Jaro Milko plays bouzouki and electric saz on several tracks, Assaf Talmudi of Oy Division plays accordion, and Marlysse Simmons of Chicha Libre plays farfisa organ. Tod A also returned to bass, an instrument he had not played on record since Firewater’s early releases, alongside acoustic guitar, banjo and organ.
Ahead of the album, Firewater released a non-LP cover of Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime,” which the band has described as a comment on the current political climate in the United States. The cover is not part of the “Bad Jazz” tracklist.
About Firewater
Tod A, born Tod Ashley, founded Firewater in New York City in 1995 following the breakup of his previous band, the noise-rock group Cop Shoot Cop. Where Cop Shoot Cop built its sound around industrial-tinged post-punk, Firewater gave Tod A room to fold klezmer, gypsy music, ska, jazz and cabaret into a punk-rooted songwriting style the band calls “world punk.” Tod A has remained Firewater’s only constant member, running the band as a rotating musical collective with no fixed lineup.
Firewater’s 1996 debut, “Get Off the Cross, We Need the Wood for the Fire,” was followed by “The Ponzi Scheme” (1998), “Psychopharmacology” (2001) and “The Man on the Burning Tightrope” (2003). “Songs We Should Have Written” (2004) reworked tracks by artists including Johnny Cash and the Rolling Stones. Past contributors to Firewater’s recordings have included Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, Yuval Gabay of Soul Coughing, Jennifer Charles of Elysian Fields and Hahn Rowe.
In the mid-2000s, Tod A travelled through India, Pakistan, Thailand and Indonesia, and the musicians he met along the way played on 2008’s “The Golden Hour.” Firewater’s most recent album before “Bad Jazz,” “International Orange!,” followed in 2012. Tod A later spent time based in Istanbul, and some of the new album’s grooves carry a Turkish influence, though he has described the songs on “Bad Jazz” as more a return to his New York punk roots. “After so long away, we knew this record needed to be as strong as it could be,” he said. “I had never stopped writing, so I had a big bag to draw from. We recorded the songs we felt were the most direct.”
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