On Cave World, Viagra Boys weaponize absurdity, tossing firecrackers into the middle of the room and standing around to see the reaction. "I just love when things get lost in translation," vocalist Sebastian Murphy says. "The whole world is going backwards, and I'm not going to tell anyone what to believe or what side to take." Like sin-eaters if sins had to be ingested from a very small spoon, Viagra Boys have consumed the utterly incomprehensible chaos of our era and distilled it into the 12 immaculate tracks that make up Cave World.

After spending the last two years thinking a lot about conspiracy theorists, anarcho-primitivism memes, and anti-vaxxers, Murphy came to a simple conclusion. "It just feels like the world is so stupid," he says. "But I kind of like when stuff is a little stupid."

As 2021’s Welfare Jazz was earning rave reviews from the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, GQ, NME, Stereogum, Fader, and more, Viagra Boys were in the midst of re-recording what would become their follow up. After putting together an entire album at the legendary Silence Studio in the town of Koppom, the band decided they could push harder. "We let it marinate for a while and then re-recorded absolutely everything," Murphy explains. Some of the music made it through to what would become Cave World. In that iterative process, Murphy found himself returning time and again to a misconception with deeper roots: the idea that humanity is moving forward. After watching a video late one evening about a theory that suggests evolution involved trading in some cognitive abilities for others, Murphy began stewing on the fact that the result was mass shootings and science denial. "I just wrote down, 'Who is the true ape?'" he says. "People look down at apes as primitive life forms, but we're just this horrible, lazy society killing each other and starting wars, while they’re able to love and feel. Does that make them the true ape or us?"