When Ben Stiller was a teenager, he played drums in a quirked-out punk band called Capital Punishment. The trio released one album, 1982’s Roadkill, a piece of music that freely employs both fake British accents and Captain Beefheart scraggle-growls. The album’s songs found their way to YouTube, and last year, word got around that Stiller was in talks to release the album. Today, we get word that Captured Tracks is planning to reissue Roadkill. Below, listen to Stiller telling Howard Stern. Also, listen to a couple of songs from Roadkill and try to tell me they don’t sound like an even-more-out-of-it Foxygen.

Thanks for the shout out, @RedHourBen…looking forward to this! https://t.co/0Zzyx4S39z

— Captured Tracks (@capturedtracks) March 26, 2015

No word yet on when this will come out, but now you know a few things about Derek Zoolander that you didn’t know before.

UPDATE: Roadkill, in an expanded reissue, will be out this fall. Here’s a track from the official reissue…

Singer Kriss Roebling has shared this note about it:

The late 70’s was a f••kin’ exciting time to be a young kid in New York City who loved music. So much new and ultra cool stuff going on, and so much amazing vinyl to listen to!! As an expression of our excitement for what was going on around us, my closest friends and I insisted on starting up a band. We called it Capital Punishment. I don’t know why.

After a while of considering ourselves a band, we got fidgety. Despite the difficulties of recording at that time (the better studios were actually auditioning clients to determine if they wanted to take their money), the fact that we still barely knew how to play our instruments, and that our musical interests seemed to be on a collision course with what the majority of our school mates were into at the time, we became hellbent on waving our very enthusiastic freak flag by recording an album. Our determination to record an album at that point in time was a perfect match for the fact that all of the best analog audio gadgetry was coming out then. In a matter of a few years, all of that equipment would be relegated to technology’s dustbin in favor of more pedestrian digital audio but, for a brief moment, it was like magic. Emboldened by an intensive audio engineering tutorial that I had recently taken, we submerged ourselves in all of this amazing analog studio gadgetry, and often wrote whole songs around the capabilities of a specific piece of gear. This endless world of sonic potential felt like it had opened up to us, and we used this experience to get our freak on in a big way. To hell with tuning the instruments, or singing in key, there are amazing soundscapes to make!!

Anyway, after we finished the album, we named it Roadkill, pressed it and sold it on consignment to numerous mom and pop record stores around New York, which I suppose is how some copies found their way to listeners who enjoyed it so many years later.

I don’t think we ever thought much about Roadkill after we got it out there, except to occasionally market it by writing “CP” (Capital Punishment) in wet sidewalk concrete. We all went our separate ways soon after sharing Roadkill, but I’ll always recall that time as a wonderful moment of total creative abandon shared between myself and the people who were, at that time, my closest friends in the whole world.

I’m utterly stoked and baffled by the fact that Roadkill is now being shared 33 years on with a larger audience, and I advise those of you who enjoy it to seek professional help FAST.

Still, you’re my kind of folk.

Peace,
Kriss Roebling