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With a distinctively dark and powerful vocal presence,
Greg Dulli is best known as the singer for Cincinnati shadowy grunge rockers the
Afghan Whigs. With a career spanning over 30 years,
Dulli fronted the
Whigs through several phases, as well as working as a producer and with side projects such as
the Twilight Singers and
the Gutter Twins, before making his official studio debut,
Random Desire, in early 2020.
Greg Dulli was born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1965. His Roman Catholic upbringing would inspire some of the later lyrical themes and imagery he repeatedly returned to in his music. As the vocalist for the
Afghan Whigs,
Dulli's seething baritone, which sometimes broke into a breathy yowl, guided albums built around songs of lust, betrayal, addiction, and revenge. The band split up first in 2001 and
Dulli kept busy with
the Twilight Singers, a collective he initially formed in 1997 as a side project; the group released their first full-length album,
Twilight As Played by the Twilight Singers, in 2000. In addition to work with that shifting entity,
Dulli appeared on tracks by
Foo Fighters and
Lo Fidelity Allstars, as well as working as a producer and doing occasional solo shows.
Dulli and
Mark Lanegan, friends who often appeared on each other's albums, teamed up for a collaborative project,
the Gutter Twins, releasing the album
Saturnalia in 2008.
The Afghan Whigs reunited in 2011, and after recording two albums with the re-formed band (2014's
Do to the Beast and 2017's
In Spades),
Dulli began work on his first proper solo album in 2017. He looked to self-sufficient artists like
Prince and
Todd Rundgren when writing the material for the record, choosing to write all the various parts himself while in the demo process. For the finished product,
Random Desire,
Dulli played most of the instruments himself but brought in supporting players to fill out the arrangements and add accents with horns, strings, and pedal steel guitar. The album was released in February 2020 by the BMG-distributed Royal Cream label. ~ Fred Thomas