Ratio record label launch with Going 2 Hell, Lean Meats, Sythe, and Rhys

Ratio celebrates its launch as the new record label home for Maine’s most adventurous purveyors of rock, art music, and experimentalism.

Smoke Break, 2High, Synner G, and Court Ordered Best Friend are Going 2 Hell, the unholy alliance of members of Mouth Washington, $300, An Anderson, and approximately twenty other nefarious local gangs. In their short life as a high concept rock outfit, they’ve developed a rabid fanbase of self-proclaimed “meatheads” and started online beefs with nearly every band in a 30-mile radius. They were voted “Portland, Maine’s Most Dangerous Band” by a jury of their peers. Their new album 2uality, Ratio’s first vinyl release, opens with a track titled “Shut the Fuck Up” and only continues on from there. 

Garage rock/electro-pop purveyors Lean Meats have been gigging around Maine and Greater Boston for nearly five years. Their hard-to-pin-down sound combines elements of garage rock, synthpop, hot kickin’ country, and fake jazz. Bring plenty of napkins.

Portland, Maine’s SYTHE are sonic architects that fuse volcanic heaviness with drifting, dissociative passages—dense, jagged, and acerbically hypnotic—making the ground feel like it’s shifting beneath your feet. Echoes of Melvins, early Mastodon, Keelhaul, Neurosis, ISIS, and Death thread through their bleak circuitry, twisted into corrosive tones that map carved-out undercurrents of psychic unraveling.

Rhys makes sludge and dark psychedelica from the furthest reaches of the Maine scene.