In the spring of 1998, young rockers Jeff Whalen and Dan Kern recorded some lo-fi demos on a Tascam 338 ¼» reel-to-reel 8-track recorder in their apartment in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The demos would soon be shopped around Hollywood, a bidding war would follow, and just a few short months later, the tapes would serve as the basis for the debut album of their band, the rock group Tsar.

These are those demos entitled The Drugboy Tapes (releasing August 22nd, 2025 via Omnivore Recordings).

According to band lore, the guys had been trying to put together a rock outfit for close to a year with no success. More than that, they didn’t have jobs or money, nor any prospects or desire for either, especially jobs. So they took Jeff’s stepdad’s credit card—to be used only in “emergencies” — and went to the Guitar Center on Sunset Blvd. and bought a bunch of cheap equipment.

That included items like effect pedals and a drum machine and a compressor called the Blue Max, with the idea that they had 30 days before returning the gear for a refund back to the credit card before it was noticed.

They already had the 8-track, which Dan found at a thrift shop, and so with the plan in place, they quit their temp jobs and set the alarm clock a-ticking: 30 days to write and record an album.

In fact, a handful of the songs had already been written, and they’d recorded a couple of them with a friend on drums. The rest, along with many false starts and fragments, were written and recorded in all-day-and-some-of-the-night sessions in their apartment at 1608 Lyman Ave.

Jeff and Dan used their guitars and bass, a mix of live drums and drum machines, a Casio keyboard, an Ibanez Rock & Play, and various other items borrowed from friends and well-wishers. As the month wore on, the Tascam 338 began to malfunction, and the project began to take on an increasingly lo-fi aspect. They would call the finished product Drugboy.

1. Silver Shifter (Demo)
2. Holdin’ Out (Demo)
3. Ordinary Gurl (Demo)
4. Kathy Fong Is The Bomb (Demo)
5. Sun Of Light (Demo)
6. I Don’t Wanna Break-Up (Demo)
7. MONoSTEReo (Demo)
8. The Glower (Demo)
9. Afradio (Demo)
10. The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (Demo)
11. Calling All Destroyers (Live on KXLU)

Tsar’s music - a hybrid of glam rock, power pop, garage rock, punk rock, arena rock, and bubblegum music - has always appealed to me, and this brilliant new album of demo’s opens on shimmering, at first, rocktastic latterly Silver Shifter and then brings us the lushly sculpted Holdin’ Out, the spacey psych rocker Ordinary Gurl and both the old school glam rock vibe of Kathy Fong Is The Bomb and the languishing grooves of Sun Of Light (Demo).

Along next is the low slung, quiet rocker I Don’t Wanna Break-Up which is itself backed by the free flowing, psych-pop of MONoSTEReo, the sturdt fare of the strident The Glower, the scratchy guitar fest that is Afradio, the set rounding out on the beautifully psych-tastic, Bolan-esque The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, closing on the dutiful rocker Calling All Destroyers (Live on KXLU).

Here are The Drugboy Tapes, professionally mastered for the first time. Together with a live radio version of “Calling All Destroyers”—the first song Tsar ever played live after welcoming Jeff Solomon on bass and Steve Coulter on drums—The Drugboy Tapes remain a vital artifact of late-1990s lo-fi glam-bubblegum indie rock, and indeed, a message from another time.

Official Purchase Link