Craig Clouse has never treated an album as an event. The Austin-based musician behind Shit and Shine put out Dead Beats Going Nowhere Vol.3 on 7 August 2026, and it is the third instalment of a series that only started in October 2025. Between the first volume and this one sits a second, released in December, that ran to sixteen tracks and included a single piece lasting over an hour.
What the Dead Beats series has become is a kind of open notebook. The titles look like file names that were never renamed: CTRL2, TECSO, SSCAZ, CP3O, and a run of tracks simply numbered DBGN#3-1 to DBGN#3-5. These are loop-based pieces built from stuttering drum machines, warped bass tones and samples shaved down until only their rhythm remains. Vol.3 is the tightest of the three so far, ten tracks in just under an hour, with DBGN#3-2 stretching past fourteen minutes as the record's slow-burning centre while the shorter cuts around it work like club edits that got lost on the way to the club.
The productivity is not new, only the format. In 2025 alone Clouse also released Mannheim HBF, an album named after railway stations in the German region where he spent part of his childhood, and Please Bring Cool Friends, a three-hour digital set of what he described as long, minimal, repetitive grooves built to bliss the listener out rather than impress them.
It is worth remembering where this comes from. Clouse, son of an American father and a British mother, played guitar in the Minneapolis trio Hammerhead in the mid-1990s and led the London noise-rock band Todd with his wife Fifi Cernosek before Shit and Shine emerged from drunken cassette sessions with a friend. The project's debut landed on the British label Riot Season in 2004, and twenty years later Clouse returned there with Rum and Coke, a filthy guitar record featuring vocals from Callum Howe of The Shits and mastering by James Plotkin. In between came releases on Powell's Diagonal imprint and Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego, the point at which Clouse's electronic side was taken seriously by people who take electronic music seriously.
He has also kept a second life going in USA/Mexico, the Austin sludge trio with Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey and bassist Nate Cross, whose Live in Paris album appeared in January 2025 on 12XU and Riot Season. Shit and Shine, on the evidence of Vol.3, is where Clouse goes to be alone with a groove and see how long it can go on.
The results are not tidy, and they are not meant to be. The pleasure of following an artist this prolific is watching the accidents accumulate into a language, and Vol.3 is that language spoken fluently.
