Kevin Bronson on June 29th, 2021

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Singer-guitarist Chad Ubovich put Meatbodies on the shelf after touring in support of their 2017 album, “Alice,” feeling wear-and-tear from his own project, playing in Mikal Cronin’s band and with Ty Segall and Charles Moothart in Fuzz and, generally, the weight of the world.

“I’d been touring for eight years straight with all these bands, and just couldn’t do it anymore,” Ubovich says. “There was also a feeling in the air that everything was changing, politically. Things just didn’t feel right, and I went down a dark path.”

By 2019, Ubovich had gotten off that dark path and gotten sober, and he and Meatbodies drummer Dylan Fujioka had finished a new album — only to have COVID-19 paralyze the world. But during the pandemic, the pair revisited some old demos, and from this batch of work emerged the new album “333,” out Sept. 3 via In the Red Records.

The first single “Reach for the Sunn” is deliciously scuzzy and foreboding, representative of the album as a whole. “These lyrics are dark, but I think these are things that a lot of people are feeling and going through,” Ubovich says. “Here in America, we’re watching the fall of U.S. capitalism, and ‘333’ is a cartoonish representation of that decline.”

Josh Erkman directs the video for the single.

||| Watch: The video for “Reach for the Sunn”

||| Live: Meatbodies, along with Levitation Room, play the Observatory on Sept. 3 (tickets on sale Thursday); Meatbodies play El Cid on Sept. 4 (tickets on sale Thursday).

||| Previously: “Creature Feature”