Drug Train

There's a locomotive quality to this track that earns its title — a grinding, forward-lurching momentum built from Ivy's guitar work, which stays in a low, churning register and refuses to let up. The tone is corroded, the edges rough, like rust playing music. The rhythm section operates with that peculiar psychobilly tension between rockabilly swing and something harder and more primitive underneath, a beat that could belong to a chain gang or a ritual. It feels like forward motion with no clear destination, which is precisely the point. Lux Interior's vocal here sits in a middle register that's more conversational than his more theatrical performances — he's telling you something, not performing for you — and that intimacy makes the lyrics' imagery land with greater force. The song is built around addiction as a kind of faith, a devotion as total and irrational as any religion, and Interior plays the true believer with terrifying sincerity. From their debut album *Songs the Lord Taught Us*, it captures the core Cramps proposition: that American roots music always carried inside it the seeds of something transgressive, and that the most honest thing to do was let those seeds grow wild. This is music for a specific kind of late-night desolation, for the moment when you've made a choice you can't undo and you're watching the landscape blur past outside a window.