Next month, underground rock mainstay J. Robbins is releasing his second solo album, Basilisk, which he announced in December with “Exquisite Corpse.” Today, he’s back with a new track called “Last War,” which he said was inspired by Before The Deluge: A Portrait Of Berlin In The 1920s by Otto Friedrich. “It really stayed with me – I can’t recommend it highly enough,” he wrote, continuing:

There’s a famous phrase that gets attributed to lots of different people: “generals always fight the last war” – we tend to see new situations through the lens of our familiar experience, and that’s how we often miss what matters most in decisive moments. The song Last War is a musical voodoo doll of a situation that honestly scares the shit out of me, over which I have next to no control: the USA in the 2020s, which is so often like the feeling of being a passenger in the moment just before a car wreck, when the driver is on autopilot, but you know it’s too late to swerve.

What’s the past for, if it looks you in the eye, but the lessons pass you by?

Listen below.

Basilisk is out 2/2 via Dischord.