Overview

This is a pre-order and will ship the week of August 14.

Every copy of the limited pink vinyl includes an exclusive bonus cassette, Hallucination-Free Insights, featuring 15 previously unreleased Radiator Hospital songs from Sam's Patreon over the past year.

After more than fifteen years of Radiator Hospital, Sam Cook-Parrott wasn't interested in looking backward. Following 2023's Can't Make Any Promises, he stepped away from the full-band incarnation of the project and began imagining an entirely new way to make—and perform—his songs. What emerged is Distorting Time, a return to the home-recorded, four-track spirit that first defined Radiator Hospital, while pushing that approach further than ever before.

Originally considering leaving the Radiator Hospital name behind, Sam found new inspiration after assembling a live set built around backing tracks recorded to a four-track cassette recorder. "It was really fun and cool," he says. "This new side of Radiator Hospital was so exciting to me that a new record came out pretty easily."

Recorded primarily at home on four-track cassette, with additional work at Jeff Zeigler's Uniform Recording in Philadelphia, Distorting Time embraces the limitations of analog recording as a creative tool. Influenced by Young Marble Giants, Tall Dwarfs, and the recording techniques of Shoes, Sam layers guitars, bass, keyboards, vintage drum machines, and tape manipulation into thirteen songs that feel both unmistakably Radiator Hospital and unlike anything the project has released before.

The album takes its name from a prompt in Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck, and its songs wrestle with the strange elasticity of time. Fifteen years into Radiator Hospital, Sam finds himself reflecting not with nostalgia, but curiosity—wondering where he's been, where he's headed, and how an artist continues evolving after more than a decade of constant creation. Elsewhere, songs like "Wildman Dance" and "Ballad of Big Nose George Parrott" stretch that fascination across generations, drawing inspiration from an experimental composer who worked into his nineties and a notorious outlaw who also happened to be one of Sam's distant ancestors.

The result is a record that feels both deeply familiar and refreshingly new. Distorting Time reconnects Radiator Hospital with its DIY origins while opening an entirely new chapter—one where limitation becomes possibility, and forward motion remains the guiding principle.