LSD, the long-delayed, posthumous final statement from one of the strangest, most exhilarating, most misunderstood bands to ever emerge from Britain’s underground feels like a transmission from another dimension.

The story behind LSD gives it a gravity that can’t be overstated. Cardiacs’ frontman and visionary Tim Smith suffered a severe brain injury in 2008 leaving him paralysed and unable to speak. He passed away in 2020, and surviving band members, family and collaborators have spent years piecing together the fragments he left behind and even communicated to them through eye movements to complete the album he’d been working on since 2007. Almost twenty years later and the last word of one of music’s great mad scientists is finally here.

LSD is 80 minutes, and like all Cardiacs records, it’s an exhausting whirlwind of impossible tempos, dizzying chord changes, and surreal theatre. Tim Smith’s compositional style is unlike anything else, the manic drive of punk colliding head-on with the structural complexity of prog, building labyrinths rather than melodies, with every note seeming to drag the chords somewhere new. The result is music that sounds like a carnival in full collapse.

The bizarre overture opener Men In Bed sets a slow and grand tone before The May hits at breakneck punk tempo, drums hammering forward while guitars, bass, and keys whirl around in intricate unison, tracing the same melodic line in manic counterpoint, the drum beat your only anchor amid the totally unpredictable delirium.

Throughout the record, there are stately passages where trumpets bloom sounding like a deranged symphony, with melodies looping and refracting like reflections in a funhouse mirror. The Blue And Buff feels like their Mr. Blue Sky, jaunty, sundrenched almost-pop, whilst Skating channels Zappa’s Hot Rats with its impossible fusion runs, and the album feels consistent considering its long and fragmented genesis. More than a posthumous release, LSD is the sound of Cardiacs closing their story on their own wild and totally unclassifiable terms.

For a posthumous release, it’s the furthest thing from solemn, bursting with colour, humour and life. The scale of it feels as if the band and Smith himself are refusing to let death be the final word, continually catching you off guard with its absurd turns, cartoonish flourishes and musical pratfalls. As a final chapter, it’s definitive. Not a funeral, but a fireworks display, LSD has proven that even from beyond the veil Tim Smith can still surprise you.

LSD is a prog-punk music-hall fairground fever dream, but also a celebration of the ridiculous, and an act of devotion and tribute to one of the most visionary composers Britain ever produced. An epic full stop to one of the strangest stories in rock history.