The Afghan Whigs How Do You Burn? 180g LP (Clear Vinyl)

The Afghan Whigs' first studio album in five years, How Do You Burn?, is their ninth album overall and follows the brace of widely-acclaimed records they've made previously since re-grouping in 2012, Do to the Beast (2014) and In Spades (2017). How Do You Burn? picks up the baton laid down by each of those records and runs it to the horizon.

For his supporting cast, lead singer Greg Dulli called upon several serial collaborators including the late Mark Lanegan, who was a regular in Dulli's Twilight Singers, a partner in The Gutter Twins and a close friend. Lanegan makes his Afghan Whigs debut singing backup vocals on two tracks. "It was Mark who named the album," Dulli remarked.

Susan Marshall, who sang on the Whigs album 1965, returns to the fray for "Catch A Colt", one of the album's standout tracks, loose-limbed like Some Girls-era Rolling Stones and with the liquid polyrhythms of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk.

The multi-talented Van Hunt, who toured with the Whigs in 2012 and guested on Do to the Beast, brings his stacked-up, wall-of-sound vocals to both the plunging, voodoo-blues of "Jyja" and the audacious "Take Me There", transforming the latter, says Dulli, "into this feral gospel song. We sing really well together, but what Van does production-wise... it's unrelenting."

Then there's Marcy Mays, lead vocalist on "My Curse", the torch-song highlight of 1993's seminal Gentlemen album, reprising her role here on the celestial "Domino and Jimmy", playing Stevie Nicks to Dulli's Lindsey Buckingham. "I wrote that song with Marcy in mind," says Dulli. "No one sounds like her; she's got an incredibly unique, emotional and evocative voice."

The Afghan Whigs are Greg Dulli, John Curley, Rick G. Nelson and Patrick Keeler, with Christopher Thorn now joining the band on guitar. Says Dulli, their future is gloriously wide open.