Across nearly three decades, The Slackers have carved a unique lane for themselves, as a smooth jazz-and-soul inflected rocksteady group that has somehow become a beloved institution at punk festivals. This latest release takes that odd, wonderful alchemy and filters it through the echo chamber of Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor, re-recording old songs with the weight of experience and creating something that feels like both a reinterpretation and a celebration.

Classics like Wasted Days and No More Crying are pulled apart and rebuilt into spacious, hypnotic dub grooves, and whilst the original songs throng with heartbreak, sorrow and longing, they take on entirely new lives in dub form. Stripped of the vocal storytelling, they become meditative slow dances that you can melt into. The production leans hard into Jamaican dub tropes, with horn lines dipping in and out and Vic Ruggiero’s vocals appearing only in fragments echoing into vast reverb chambers. The basslines are enormous whilst the drums are reduced to clicky, skeletal rhythms, everything awash with delay and echo. It’s mellow and inviting, executed with the kind of sophistication that only comes from muscians who’ve been perfecting their craft for decades. Tin Tin Dub is so authentically rootsy it could pass for a vintage Jamaican pressing rather than the work of a New York band. The Slackers’ penchant for heartbreak and world-weariness is perfectly suited to the echo-drenched universe of dub, and Dub Classics feels like The Slackers doing what they do best. Marcus Geard’s deep, hypnotic bass lines anchor the sprawling reverb-drenched space with total authority, and because the band has been looping these grooves for decades they can lean into dub’s experimental tendencies without ever losing their balance. The genre’s echo-heavy minimalism can sometimes feel alien and disorienting but here it’s rich, textured, and full of life, even when the arrangements strip back to their barest bones.