Released last Friday, The Sky Was a Mouth Again marks the second installment in Diet Of Worms’ ongoing exploration of ‘Louie Louie’ as a vessel for dissent.
A year after Hunger Is Violence, the Dublin cassette label and publisher returns with a deeper, more unruly dive, gathering artists like Richard Dawson, Charles Hayward of This Heat, Iceage’s Elias Rønnenfelt, Junior Brother, and Valentina Magaletti to tear the song apart & reassemble it in solidarity with Palestine.
Below, Gavin Duffy unpacks the intent and atmosphere behind the project.
Few songs have endured, or come undone, quite like ‘Louie Louie’. Written by Richard Berry in 1955 and made infamous by The Kingsmen’s slurred, chaotic version, it has lived for decades on the margins: banned, botched, beloved. Its muddy vocals and raw three-chord structure have always carried something unruly. To me, it’s always felt like a shared noise for those pushing back.
With The Sky Was A Mouth Again, we wanted to flip that legacy inside out – less reverence, more rupture. Rather than a tribute or covers compilation, this release brings together artists from around the world to pull ‘Louie Louie’ apart – reframing and reimagining it as a sprawling, unstable architecture of sound and resistance.
It follows Hunger Is Violence, a politically urgent release we put out late last year in support of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Where that compilation was rooted in Ireland’s underground, this one stretches further – across borders, across approaches. The idea was to build a distributed network: music as message, protest and open space.
There’s no fixed route through it. New Yorker Lea Bertucci and Melbourne’s Alex Macfarlane take it in opposite directions. The Shifters lean into its garage roots. Garbaggio (Nic Offer of !!! and Sadie Laska of Growing) add dance-punk energy. Others – Amber Meulenijzer, burger service, Leda (Sofie Herner of Neutral) and I.U.D. – explore meditative, strange and jarring reinterpretations.
What connects them isn’t style but intent. Some versions barely retain ‘Louie Loui’ at all – maybe a fleeting chord progression, a submerged vocal line or a ghost of the rhythm. Others twist those fragments through cultural and emotional filters: musique concrète, extended vocal techniques, hauntological collage.
Cult figures Billy Childish and Charles Hayward (This Heat), along with White Magic, Nonpareils (Aaron Hemphill, ex-Liars), Elias Rønnenfelt (Iceage), Junior Brother, ELLLL, Maarja Nuu and Richard Dawson all contribute distinct voices to this collective atmosphere.
The title The Sky Was A Mouth Again came late, after most of the music was already in place. It emerged from an email exchange with Rich Dawson, whose closing track plays like a rhythmic patchwork of spectral funk, dreamlike in its collapse. The phrase stuck. It wasn’t a concept or a slogan, more like a fragment that made sense of something already taking shape.
That atmosphere is echoed in the striking artwork by Irish visual artist Cian Walker. His piece doesn’t illustrate the music so much as move with it. It pulses with tension and disintegration – abstract, urgent and tactile. There’s motion in it, something unresolvable.
In a time of algorithmic outrage and fleeting attention spans, we hope The Sky Was A Mouth Again serves as a reminder that music – especially when it resists legibility – can still hold space for protest, empathy and defiance. Gavin Duffy
