“I wanna get undead.”
That’s one of the many fitting, mortality-minded lines you’ll find on Dax Riggs’ new 7 Songs for Spiders album, the cult psych/sludge figure’s first solo album in a decade and a half. Its sung yearningly above the gutter-blues fuzz-stortion of the record’s stunning and swaggery “even the stars fall,” and, in a meta kind of way, the line reflects how the Louisiana musician is currently unearthing himself from an artistic purgatory. Twice over, you could argue.
Indeed, the return of Dax Riggs was doubly unexpected. Just shortly after surprise-announcing 7 Songs for Spiders last fall with its bluesy first single, “deceiver,” Riggs also announced reunion dates with Acid Bath — the influential and dangerous-as-fuck-sounding Southern sludge faction he formed in the early Nineties — whom he hasn’t played live with since 1997.
They’ll make their grand, grotesque return in April with two instantly-sold-out shows in New Orleans, before taking the reunion to much bigger stages at the Sonic Temple, Welcome to Rockville, Inkcarceration and Louder Than Life festivals.
Honestly, it’s been a lot for superfans to process, considering Riggs had mostly spent the past few years delivering record recommendation on Instagram (his turntable, it seems, is a haven for 1920s-era gospel-blues and Saharan rock). Both his new solo record and the Acid Bath reunion have become some of 2025’s most anticipated heavy-music moments.
Recorded in Riggs’ own studio, somewhere in the swamps of Southern Louisiana, 7 Songs pieces like “deceiver,” “even the stars fall” and “ain’t that darkness” are swimming in religious allegory, graveyard scenes and other assorted “damn demon things” that Riggs is conjuring with his electric guitar.
In a certain light, “deceiver” could be seen as Riggs reflecting on his relative inactivity — the mud-thick but melodic track, after all, has him croonin’ of time spent loungin’ in a casket long-term. Then again, with regards to an in-song shoutout to serial killer Son of Sam, it’s anthemic chorus could be discussing moral ambiguity as much as it is a lack of tangible life experience (“Ain’t no great deceiver/Ain’t no bride of Jesus either”). Speaking with Revolver, Riggs says he’d rather let listeners interpret those symbols as they will.
What’s surer — to paraphrase how he puts it in “even the stars fall” — is that Riggs has once again got his soul tangled up in a song. Seven, actually.
With his new solo album in tow and Acid Bath about to mangle the masses for the first time in 28 years, Riggs revealed a bit more behind his morbid sense of humor, making new music alongside “Cajun cosmonauts” and a keyboard-hungry rat, and more.
7 Songs for Spiders marks your first release — solo or otherwise — since 2010, while you haven’t really played any shows since 2015. It’s not that you disappeared, exactly, but how have you been keeping yourself busy over the years?
DAX RIGGS I just needed to unplug. I was burned out on playing too much, and unable to focus on songwriting like I wanted to. There was something inside me that wanted some time. [Then] I put a studio together and wrote some songs.
I like the creative process of writing the best — the writing and the dreaming of songs. I have a lot more material that I’m excited about recording.
What’s the oldest song on the album, and which is the newest?
They were all born about the same time, more-or-less in the last 5 years. I cut the songs that I’d been anchored to for a while to start [fresh] again. I was very excited about writing.
Getting down [and] making them a real thing is a joyful process for me. I feel almost electrified when I’m touched by some idea that I feel is outside my ability.
Why did it feel like the right time to put out new music, following such a long gap?
No real reason, I just realized the world was ending.
Allusions to gods, demons, ghosts, the undead, Jesus and the Devil pop up all throughout your lyrics on this record. How did your thoughts on faith, mortality and the afterlife inform these songs?
For me, they are personal symbols in a pantheon that kind of exists in my general atmosphere, in a language beyond words called “song.” It’s not what I think — when I sing about Jesus or Lucifer, it’s more about what you [as the listener] project. The listener colors these symbols with what they mean to them, and what they see in their life. These are just characters in a cosmic play.
The record’s first single, “deceiver,” has you singing “Now I know how the Son of Sam is feeling,” while Acid Bath’s debut album, When a Kite String Pops, infamously featured John Wayne Gacy’s “Pogo the Clown” painting on its front cover. Where does your interest in serial killers come from, and how would you say that’s influenced your art over the years?
In that regard, I’m still the same. It’s not really my thing, but I’ve got a blasphemous sense of humor and a morbid fascination [with serial killers].
This collection reunites you with Lucas Broussard, who you’d made a Deadboy & the Elephantmen album with back in the Aughts. What can you tell us about him and the other collaborators on 7 Songs for Spiders, and how it all came together in your studio?
It was recorded in my studio with the Cajun cosmonauts: [guitarist] Captain Lucas Broussard, [bassist] Kane Cormier and friends. The studio’s in a quasi-abandoned building we’re fixing up, and we had to share our space with a mischievous family of whiskey raccoons. One winter the rats ate the knobs off the Moog synthesizer.
Somewhat riffing off your “blues for you know who,” what all’s got you singing the blues at the moment?
My head’s really in love with Lebanese and Egyptian music right now, like Warda and Oum Kalsoum, [but also] the Watersons, early Johnny Paycheck and the first three UFO records.
2025 sees Acid Bath set to perform their first shows together since the late Nineties. What were the circumstances that brought you folks back together again, and what can fans look forward to with these reunion shows?
I don’t know man… It’s always been there in the shadows, and it [finally] found a way out.
Order Dax Rigg’s 7 Songs for Spiders on vinyl at Revolver’s shop.