FAVORITES OF 2025!
7/14/26 ADDS
CURRENT
UPCOMING
RECENT
LIVE
ABOUT
RADIATOR HOSPITAL
Distorting Time (Lame-O Records)
Add date: 8.18.2026
Release date: 8.14.2026
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Instagram
Lame-O Records
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
On the sixth Radiator Hospital LP, Distorting Time, Sam Cook-Parrott isn’t playing with nostalgia; he's actively avoiding it. Over the course of fifteen years, he’s grown RH from a solo, bedroom-recording project into a fully-fledged rock n roll quartet, skirting with mainstream success while garnering a reputation as a true underdog of the DIY scene.
Last time out, 2023’s Can't Make Any Promises captured the sound that Cook-Parrott had been refining over the years, a uniquely chaotic blend of lofi aesthetics and simmering temperatures. The release of that record left Sam at something of a crossroads. It’s 16 years since he started releasing tapes of his own, 13 years since the first Radiator Hospital LP, and 10 years since the band had become a steady four-piece. While all of those timelines colliding held up a mirror of-sorts, Sam was determined not to spend time reflecting and instead look only at what lay beyond.
He began by taking a step back from it all. During this downtime, the band version of Radiator Hospital quietly drew to a close, and he began to plot a whole new chapter for his songs, a move that he thought might take him away from the name he’d been carrying with him since 2010. Out of the blue, however, Radiator Hospital were offered a tour opportunity in late 2025, and it led to Sam re-thinking his approach, twisting the fabric of his previous work into a whole new form once again. It was a reshaping that would act as a catalyst for a bold new chapter.
“I decided to do a new live thing I had never done before, where I recorded my backing music to a 4-track cassette recorder, and then just sang,” Cook-Parrott explains. “It was really fun and cool. I already knew I wanted to do some new music, but this new side of Radiator Hospital was so exciting to me that a new record came out pretty easily.”
Returning to his home-recorded bedroom-pop origins offered Sam a new kind of freedom, leaving him to explore the roots of his work, to push things to the outer-edges of boundaries that had naturally existed within a more traditional band setup. The result is Distorting Time, a brand new collection of songs – his first release on Lame-O Records – formed of 13 songs recorded to 4-track cassette in Sam’s home, with a few additional flourishes captured at Jeff Zeigler's Uniform Recording studio in Philadelphia.
Formed from a lightning bolt of inspiration, the first song for the album was written in December of 2025, with the whole thing wrapped up by the end of February. “It was the perfect mix of doing it mostly at home and then perfecting it in a studio,” Sam says. In this short period of time, he worked hard to stick to strict deadlines, waking up each day to try and make a new song from scratch. “I pretty much recorded as I wrote it, throughout January and February,” he adds.
Both gently familiar but strikingly distinct, Distorting Time embraces the confines of the 4-track setup, while taking inspiration from the likes of Young Marble Giants and Tall Dwarfs, as well as the recording techniques of the 70’s Illinois band Shoes. Staying true to his new setup, Sam embraced many of the signature 4-track recording methods, from recording parts backwards, to deliberately slowing things down and back up again, creating skewed layers of sound for his voice to sit within. As such, every track here contains just four tracks per song, vocals aside, with Sam playing guitar, bass, and keys alongside a handful of 70's and 80's drum machines.
These methods formed a whole new world for Radiator Hospital to exist within, shaping the album’s overriding sound in ways that are evident from the outset. The record bursts into life from the initial moments of opening track “Can You See The Future?”, an unruly 75-seconds of scorched instrumentation, and that signature and expressive vocal that has run through the heart of everything Sam has put his name to. The track soon gives way to the more spacious “A Fine Vintage”, where drum-beats never let-up but are balanced by a more sympathetic voice, a less abrasive temperature.
Those two faces are present throughout Distorting Time. It is at times thrillingly tumultuous, that scuzzy, scorched signature Radiator Hospital sound feeling even more brittle when held within the confines of his new setup, but there’s always a counterbalance to the noise.
Thematically, the songs here dig into the strange sensation of passing time, especially through the lens of an artist and their work. There’s a constant questioning in the songs, a kind of peeling back the layers to try and explore where Sam’s been and where he’s going. Is he still young, in his early thirties, given that he could live until he’s one-hundred? Is he old, because he was a kid when this all started and he’s now fifteen years into a career he often didn’t realise he was forging for himself? “If you've heard of Radiator Hospital you might have a pretty good idea of what you think a song will sound like, but before I make a song, I don’t even know what it’s gonna be!” Sam says, speaking to that. “I still feel like I'm doing something fresh and new (to me at least), even though on some timelines you could argue my shit was over long ago.”
This pulling apart of timelines also led him to write two songs about historical figures. The first, “Wildman Dance”, is about Leo Ornstein, an American experimental composer and pianist who turned his back on public performance at a young age, but continued making records until the age of 94. Then there’s “Ballad of Big Nose George Parrott”, a singular, oddly moving piece of music about one of Sam’s distant ancestors, an outlaw of the Old West, who was lynched in 1881 before having his skin tanned into a pair of shoes, and a part of his skull fashioned into an ashtray.
These journeys through time, whether diving back to long-gone ancestors, or peering into what might lie ahead, all come together in this new chapter for Radiator Hospital. Parts of it might feel familiar but the fabric itself has changed. It’s the sound of an artist continuing to move forward while always acknowledging the past in a non-nostalgic way.
“I was strongly considering going in a completely different direction and starting a different-sounding project,” Sam explains. “Instead a switch flipped and I could see how all my new ideas could fit on the continuum of Radiator Hospital. It’s still the project I’ve been doing for almost half my life. I can see the connection between this and my earliest work, while also knowing I never could have made this record in any other time of my life than now.”
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Lame-O Records
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
On the sixth Radiator Hospital LP, Distorting Time, Sam Cook-Parrott isn’t playing with nostalgia; he's actively avoiding it. Over the course of fifteen years, he’s grown RH from a solo, bedroom-recording project into a fully-fledged rock n roll quartet, skirting with mainstream success while garnering a reputation as a true underdog of the DIY scene.
Last time out, 2023’s Can't Make Any Promises captured the sound that Cook-Parrott had been refining over the years, a uniquely chaotic blend of lofi aesthetics and simmering temperatures. The release of that record left Sam at something of a crossroads. It’s 16 years since he started releasing tapes of his own, 13 years since the first Radiator Hospital LP, and 10 years since the band had become a steady four-piece. While all of those timelines colliding held up a mirror of-sorts, Sam was determined not to spend time reflecting and instead look only at what lay beyond.
He began by taking a step back from it all. During this downtime, the band version of Radiator Hospital quietly drew to a close, and he began to plot a whole new chapter for his songs, a move that he thought might take him away from the name he’d been carrying with him since 2010. Out of the blue, however, Radiator Hospital were offered a tour opportunity in late 2025, and it led to Sam re-thinking his approach, twisting the fabric of his previous work into a whole new form once again. It was a reshaping that would act as a catalyst for a bold new chapter.
“I decided to do a new live thing I had never done before, where I recorded my backing music to a 4-track cassette recorder, and then just sang,” Cook-Parrott explains. “It was really fun and cool. I already knew I wanted to do some new music, but this new side of Radiator Hospital was so exciting to me that a new record came out pretty easily.”
Returning to his home-recorded bedroom-pop origins offered Sam a new kind of freedom, leaving him to explore the roots of his work, to push things to the outer-edges of boundaries that had naturally existed within a more traditional band setup. The result is Distorting Time, a brand new collection of songs – his first release on Lame-O Records – formed of 13 songs recorded to 4-track cassette in Sam’s home, with a few additional flourishes captured at Jeff Zeigler's Uniform Recording studio in Philadelphia.
Formed from a lightning bolt of inspiration, the first song for the album was written in December of 2025, with the whole thing wrapped up by the end of February. “It was the perfect mix of doing it mostly at home and then perfecting it in a studio,” Sam says. In this short period of time, he worked hard to stick to strict deadlines, waking up each day to try and make a new song from scratch. “I pretty much recorded as I wrote it, throughout January and February,” he adds.
Both gently familiar but strikingly distinct, Distorting Time embraces the confines of the 4-track setup, while taking inspiration from the likes of Young Marble Giants and Tall Dwarfs, as well as the recording techniques of the 70’s Illinois band Shoes. Staying true to his new setup, Sam embraced many of the signature 4-track recording methods, from recording parts backwards, to deliberately slowing things down and back up again, creating skewed layers of sound for his voice to sit within. As such, every track here contains just four tracks per song, vocals aside, with Sam playing guitar, bass, and keys alongside a handful of 70's and 80's drum machines.
These methods formed a whole new world for Radiator Hospital to exist within, shaping the album’s overriding sound in ways that are evident from the outset. The record bursts into life from the initial moments of opening track “Can You See The Future?”, an unruly 75-seconds of scorched instrumentation, and that signature and expressive vocal that has run through the heart of everything Sam has put his name to. The track soon gives way to the more spacious “A Fine Vintage”, where drum-beats never let-up but are balanced by a more sympathetic voice, a less abrasive temperature.
Those two faces are present throughout Distorting Time. It is at times thrillingly tumultuous, that scuzzy, scorched signature Radiator Hospital sound feeling even more brittle when held within the confines of his new setup, but there’s always a counterbalance to the noise.
Thematically, the songs here dig into the strange sensation of passing time, especially through the lens of an artist and their work. There’s a constant questioning in the songs, a kind of peeling back the layers to try and explore where Sam’s been and where he’s going. Is he still young, in his early thirties, given that he could live until he’s one-hundred? Is he old, because he was a kid when this all started and he’s now fifteen years into a career he often didn’t realise he was forging for himself? “If you've heard of Radiator Hospital you might have a pretty good idea of what you think a song will sound like, but before I make a song, I don’t even know what it’s gonna be!” Sam says, speaking to that. “I still feel like I'm doing something fresh and new (to me at least), even though on some timelines you could argue my shit was over long ago.”
This pulling apart of timelines also led him to write two songs about historical figures. The first, “Wildman Dance”, is about Leo Ornstein, an American experimental composer and pianist who turned his back on public performance at a young age, but continued making records until the age of 94. Then there’s “Ballad of Big Nose George Parrott”, a singular, oddly moving piece of music about one of Sam’s distant ancestors, an outlaw of the Old West, who was lynched in 1881 before having his skin tanned into a pair of shoes, and a part of his skull fashioned into an ashtray.
These journeys through time, whether diving back to long-gone ancestors, or peering into what might lie ahead, all come together in this new chapter for Radiator Hospital. Parts of it might feel familiar but the fabric itself has changed. It’s the sound of an artist continuing to move forward while always acknowledging the past in a non-nostalgic way.
“I was strongly considering going in a completely different direction and starting a different-sounding project,” Sam explains. “Instead a switch flipped and I could see how all my new ideas could fit on the continuum of Radiator Hospital. It’s still the project I’ve been doing for almost half my life. I can see the connection between this and my earliest work, while also knowing I never could have made this record in any other time of my life than now.”