Gluecifer drop “I’m Ready” Video

If you’re American, the easiest way to understand Gluecifer is to imagine what it would feel like if a band like the Ramones, or maybe the MC5, disappeared for two decades and then returned without any interest in explaining themselves. No oral history, no apology tour, no attempt to narrativize the gap. Their story makes the most sense once you realize they never behaved like a band that believed permanence was a virtue. They functioned more like a controlled explosion, unconcerned with how it might later be framed or archived. Which is ironic, because they ended up being remembered extremely well.

Gluecifer formed in Oslo in 1994, just as Norwegian music was becoming globally synonymous with black metal extremity, and, presumably, an alarming number of emergency helicopter rescues dispatched to snow-covered forests to retrieve drunk men in corpse paint who had wandered off during photo shoots. (Unofficial estimate: most of them.) Gluecifer chose the opposite posture. They were about swagger, velocity, and a strain of rock ’n’ roll that treats fun as a legitimate philosophical position rather than a guilty pleasure.

Their influences weren’t mysterious: punk rock’s blunt force, classic rock’s strut, glam’s theatrical confidence, and a distinctly American sense of excess, filtered through a Scandinavian work ethic that ensured the songs actually kicked ass.

Their 1997 debut, Ridin’ the Tiger, announced a band uninterested in restraint. It was raw, fast, and proudly borrowed from everything without apologizing for anything. Soaring with Eagles at Night, to Rise with the Pigs in the Morning followed in 1998, cementing their reputation as Norway’s premier action-rock export. By the time Basement Apes arrived in 2000, Gluecifer had sharpened their attack. The songs were tighter, the hooks clearer, and the band’s identity felt more visceral and deliberate. Tender Is the Savage (2004) expanded that palette slightly, flirting with melody and polish while still sounding like it might collapse if you stared at it too long.

Their final pre-hiatus album, Automatic Thrill (2006), felt like both a culmination and a controlled burn. Shortly after its release, Gluecifer disbanded. There was no dramatic implosion, no cautionary tale. They simply stopped, as if the experiment had reached its logical conclusion.

That logic was revisited in 2018, a recalibration that eventually led to last September’s release of “The Idiot”—a track that lands with the punch of Mötley Crüe if the cocaine and groupies had been replaced by Johnny Cash conversations and a more responsible relationship with Jack Daniel’s. It wasn’t framed as a return so much as a correction, laying the first brick on the road toward Same Drug New High, their first studio album in 21 years, due January 16, 2026 via Steamhammer.

The latest glimpse into that world is “I’m Ready,” a song that doesn’t behave like a comeback single so much as a quiet assertion that momentum, once rediscovered, has a way of sustaining itself. As singer Biff Malibu explains, “It’s one of the last songs we wrote for the record. Captain Poon had worked out a chord structure that fell into place really fast, and that we felt had a kind of happy and positive ring to it. I threw in some lyrics on the same note, and the song sort of wrote itself from there.”