Tripping Yarns

When Cardiacs leader Tim Smith died in 2020, no one thought the long-awaited follow-up to Guns would see light of day. But Smith's brother Jim teamed up with bandmates Craig Fortnam and Kavus Torabi to piece together the fragments of music that had been left behind and now, after years of hard work, LSD is finally here. The team behind it tell Prog about the missing piece of Cardiacs' jigsaw and what else lies in store.

- Dom Lawson

It's an album that should probably have never happened.

But now, against all odds, it has finally arrived. The new Cardiacs LP, LSD, has been greeted with a fervent passion that few other acts could conceivably generate. The cult band to end them all, Cardiacs could easily have been laid to rest alongside their erstwhile leader and resident genius, Tim Smith, who tragically passed away back in 2020. Instead, the remaining members of the band's last functioning line-up have joined forces with a dazzling cast of friends and affiliates, and completed work on a mind-bending double album that began life way back in 2007. As Tim's elder sibling, Cardiacs bassist Jim Smith, correctly notes, LSD really does have Tim's stink all over it.

"Now that it's out, I'm not relieved, because I thoroughly enjoyed the process," says Smith. "It's good to have it out there, and it's nice that it's getting a good reaction. I thought everyone would be going, 'Oh, Tim's not on it, it's not the same!' But it stinks of him, doesn't it? They're all his tunes. He wrote it all. All we've done is try and do our best with it, and I think we've done a pretty good job." The road to LSD has been an eventful one. Work on the followup to 1999's Guns began when Tim Smith and Cardiacs guitarist Kavus Torabi hit the studio to begin assembling the songs that would form the band's next big statement. Unbeknown to them both, events would soon conspire to stop LSD in its tracks.

"We'd got a bunch of songs that we wanted to do, and these were going to be LSD," says Torabi. "Tim didn't make demos, but what he did do was block out how the songs are going to go. At its most basic, it would be the most rudimentary programmed drums and some MIDI keyboards, maybe with him singing some guide vocals over the top. On some of them he put guide guitars and a bit of bass. That's how it all started."

Initial sessions for