BROOKLYN, NY — Brooklyn-based purveyor of brazen, psych-tinged rock and roll and biker punk Lord Sonny The Unifier — the artistic brainchild of multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, lyricist, painter, biker, and self-described nuisance to the uninspired status quo Greg Jiritano — announces the release of his new album, The Escape Plan Handbook, out August 25, 2026 on all digital platforms, with vinyl to follow shortly. His most raw and brazen offering yet, it is an eclectic sonic blast built entirely on analog gear, tube amps, and wild, near-incoherent synths from the early 70s — and it captures collective frustration and cultural zeitgeist with the precision and velocity of lightning in a bottle.
For fans of Viagra Boys, The Lennon Claypool Delirium, Ty Segall, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Motörhead, The Beatles, and Jack White — expect dark storytelling, gritty untethered rock, diabolical vocals, grunts, screams, and the particular liberation that comes from an artist who revels, happily and completely, in pure uncut menace.
Jiritano’s guiding principle throughout the making of The Escape Plan Handbook was as clear as it was uncompromising: keep it dirty and real.
“All analog, tube amps and wild, near incoherent synths from the early 70s,” he says. “Like a very used motorcycle’s vibes.”
The thematic heart of the record reaches further — back to a version of America that no longer exists, and forward into the fantasy of reclaiming it. Jiritano kept returning to a specific image: the freedom that existed before the internet and social media, when a person could disappear for a weekend and nobody knew where they were. No way to track you down. A walk down the road. A vanish. That unbridled, unmonitored freedom that once lived in the American archetype — cheap rent, cheap food, minimum wage covering the basics, no undercurrent of existential fear driving people into work they never chose and lives that don’t fit.
“I was thinking of those times,” he says, “of really cool women in their cutoff shorts and all of us meeting at hidden spots many days drives from home to a wilder, uninhabited America. Some in vans, some on motorcycles, some in small campervans. This is The Escape Plan. Iconoclasts who disregard the day-to-day politics and realities of daily life and say — I see you and don’t accept an iota of it. I’m gonna go this way with my tribe. And we are the happy ones. You want to be us.”
Every song on the album was conceived from inside that world — or from the outside looking at it with longing. Written from the perspective of being either deep in the escape or watching it from the road, The Escape Plan Handbook is an album about the people who chose freedom over compliance, and what the rest of us lose by forgetting that was ever an option.
