After five years of relative quiet, Puscifer are stepping back into the spotlight with Normal Isn’t, their first full-length since 2020, arriving February 6 via Puscifer Entertainment, Alchemy Recordings, and BMG. The album finds the trio, made of Maynard James Keenan, Mat Mitchell, and Carina Round, stripping away polish in favor of something sharper, heavier, and more confrontational, pulling directly from the post-punk and goth influences that shaped their earliest musical identities.
“We’re definitely leaning into our early influences,” Keenan says. “It’s the place where goth meets punk. It’s where I came from.” That lineage runs throughout Normal Isn’t, an 11-track record that balances Puscifer’s trademark dark humor and electronic textures with a newly aggressive, guitar-forward edge.
The band previewed the album with lead single “Self Evident,” released alongside a video directed by Mat Mitchell and María Aceves Diego. Filmed during an intimate August performance at Exchange L.A., where Puscifer played the album in full for a limited audience, the video captures the immediacy and rawness that define the new material. The song itself feels less sculpted than past releases, less urgent and tense.
That looseness was intentional. Written and recorded across Arizona, Los Angeles, and on the road during last year’s Sessanta tour, Normal Isn’t emerged from a more spontaneous creative process. Mitchell, who co-produced the album, describes a conscious decision to remove constraints. “From the outset, we had discussed an element of rawness and edge, which guitar brings,” he explains. “We got rid of the guard rails and made the music more aggressive.”
For Keenan, the shift also meant rethinking his role in the songwriting process. Instead of arriving with abstract ideas or references, he built full demos using his own digital recording setup before sharing them with Mitchell and Round. According to Round, that change reshaped the band’s dynamic. “Instead of just saying, ‘I want this to sound like Fleetwood Mac on cocaine if they had a baby with PJ Harvey,’ Maynard was showing us his intention,” she says. “In Puscifer, any idea can totally change without any preciousness—and everybody’s on board.”
Lyrically and thematically, Normal Isn’t reflects a world that feels increasingly off-kilter. “As storytellers and artists, our job is to observe, interpret, and report,” Keenan says. “What we see around us does not appear normal. Not by a long shot.” That perspective threads through songs like the title track, “A Public Stoning,” and the ominous closer “Seven One,” which features guest contributions from Tony Levin on bass, Danny Carey on drums, and narration from Ian Ross.
Additional contributors across the album include Greg Edwards on bass, Gunnar Olsen on drums, and Sarah Jones on drums, reinforcing the sense that Normal Isn’t is both collaborative and deliberately unrefined. The album’s cover art—a painting by Andrea Kowch, extends that mood visually, pairing unease with stark, cinematic beauty.
Alongside the album announcement, Puscifer have confirmed a North American tour in support of Normal Isn’t, launching March 20 in Las Vegas and wrapping May 14 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. The run includes stops at Terminal 5 in New York and a high-profile date at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. Tickets and VIP packages go on sale October 24, with an artist presale beginning October 23 using the code PSC26.
More than two decades into its existence, Puscifer remain less a conventional band than a self-contained creative ecosystem—one that merges music, performance, visual art, and narrative into a singular, often unsettling whole. Normal Isn’t doesn’t attempt to soften that vision. Instead, it sharpens it, embracing discomfort, distortion, and dissonance as honest reflections of the moment we’re living in.
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Upcoming Dates
April 7 New York, NY Terminal 5
