New Halloween single from Librarians With Hickeys: "Ghoul You Want" out October 17
The BIG STIR RECORDS Halloween party continues with a new, spine-chilling single from Ohio's own LIBRARIANS WITH HICKEYS. “Ghoul You Want” is the lead track on the new collection CHILLING, THRILLING HOOKS AND HAUNTED HARMONIES, and it gets a standalone release on October 17 to cement its status as classic for this scary season and many more to come. It'll be accompanied by a music video evoking the age of VHS fright night rentals, and it's up for pre-order and pre-save now:
PRE SAVE HERE
LIBRARIANS WITH HICKEYS are no strangers to songs of the supernatural: one of their most memorable hits was “Ghost Singer” from their second album, the 2022 breakthrough HANDCLAPS & TAMBOURINES. Fresh off the success of album number three, last year's HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS BY TELEPHONE, the Librarians – singer-guitarist-multinstrumentalists RAY CARMEN and MIKE CROOKER – were poised to deliver a terrifying tale for CHILLING, THRILLING HOOKS AND HARMONIES, Big Stir's collection of all-new music for Halloween (out now as a Deluxe Double LP set, a CD, and Streaming everywhere), and with “Ghoul You Want” they do just that. The song is such a rush of of jangling menace blended with macabre humor – think The Church or The Mighty Lemon Drops with lyrics penned by Zacherle or Bobby “Boris” Pickett – that it was a clear pick to open the album.
Landing the lead track is quite an honor considering that the track list also includes superlative offerings from The Strawberry Alarm Clock, Splitsvile, The Spongetones, The Jack Rubies, Graham Parker and beloved indie bands like sparkle*jets u.k. and The Armoires (who delivered the first and second CHILLING, THRILLING singles). But where those artists stake out their own territory within the wide open field of scary subject matter, zeroing in on witches, Frankenstein's monster, alien invaders or the very Devil, LWH go directly, vampirically, for the jugular of the horror genre itself, and in “Ghoul,” they deliver a definitive song for All Hallow's Eve.
Mike and Ray explain it thusly: “On this song, we pay tribute to the Halloween season by delivering a tune that doesn’t just give a wink and a nod to both Devo and Cliff Richard, but also bows before the altar of the late great Ernie Anderson, legend of Cleveland late night television, hosting grade Z horror movies under the name Ghoulardi. Only a band from Northeast Ohio could come up with something like this tale of a midnight deal gone wrong, or maybe it went right?” They slyly add a nod to the quintessential horror rockers, The Cramps – “Stay sick friends!!” – and then vanish into the night.
They'll be back, not only with new music, but every Halloween henceforth, as both “Ghoul You Want” and the full CHILLING, THRILLING HOOKS AND HAUNTED HARMONIES album are destined to become annual traditions each October. The eerie green vinyl discs and that board game in the gatefold (featuring LWH and all the other artists and monsters of the album) guarantee it, and LIBRARIANS WITH HICKEYS kick it all off with fiendish delight. Stay sick indeed!
