By Seamus Fitzpatrick
There are bands whose identity lives in a singer’s voice. Others are defined by a guitarist’s tone, a songwriter’s perspective, or a particular approach to production. Listening to A Handful of Nuggs, one hears that Primus has always occupied stranger territory. Its center of gravity resides in the bass.
That observation may sound obvious. Les Claypool’s playing has been discussed, celebrated, imitated, and mythologized for decades. What strikes while listening to this EP isn’t simply the quality of the bass work. It was the extent to which the bass continues to function as the band’s primary musical force. These songs don’t feel built around riffs, chord progressions, or vocal melodies in the traditional rock sense. They feel constructed from grooves outward, as though the bass establishes the laws of physics and the rest of the music learns how to live inside them.
For all the attention surrounding drummer John Hoffman’s arrival, A Handful of Nuggs ultimately reinforces continuity more than change. New personnel, guest appearances, a cover song, and a live recording all pass through the same unmistakable filter. The bass remains the first voice you follow and, more often than not, the voice that determines where the music goes next.
“The Ol’ Grizz” makes that realization impossible to ignore. The track opens with electronic textures, angular guitar fragments, and enough sonic oddity to keep the listener slightly off balance. Backward effects drift through the upper register. Intervallic guitar figures flash in and out of view. Then Claypool enters with a slap-and-pop groove that feels like accompaniment and an act of authorship.
Somewhere during the song, its easy to stop thinking about Claypool as the band’s bassist. That sounds absurd to say about a musician whose identity is so closely tied to the instrument, but the realization felt important. What happens moves past exceptional bass playing supporting a song. One is hearing songs being built from bass lines.
As “The Ol’ Grizz” unfolds, the bass continually changes responsibilities. One moment it serves as a rhythmic engine. The next it becomes a melodic guide. Chordal punctuations appear where another band might rely on rhythm guitar. Upper-register fills briefly seize the listener’s attention before dropping back into the groove. Counterpoint emerges and dissolves. Themes return in altered forms. The effect is less like hearing a bassist play an elaborate part and more like watching a composer think out loud through an instrument.
What is captivating wasn’t the complexity itself. Primus has always been complex. The surprise was how natural the complexity felt. The song never stops to admire its own cleverness. Quarter-note figures gradually expand into denser rhythmic ideas. Instrumental sections develop through accumulation rather than interruption. Momentum arrives not because the band becomes louder, but because the music evolves from something to something.
That journey is significantly led by the decisions that originate from the relationship between Claypool and Hoffman.
Listening closely and pay less attention to Hoffman as an individual drummer than to the space between him and Claypool. A groove expands. A transition appears. A phrase suddenly gains momentum. It does not feel like one player leading while the other follows. The music advances because both are pulling in the same direction.
That relationship may be the most revealing aspect of Hoffman’s arrival. Rather than redefining Primus, he appears to understand precisely what kind of musical ecosystem he has entered. His drumming doesn’t challenge the band’s identity. It deepens it. The performances feel collaborative in the truest sense, with bass and drums sharing responsibility for directing the music’s flow.
The partnership becomes even more apparent on “Little Lord Fentanyl,” one of the EP’s most adventurous pieces. Built around intervallic bass figures, compound-meter sensations, unexpected harmonic movement, and sharply defined ensemble hits, the track demonstrates how Primus continues to generate complexity through design rather than display.
During the song, when searching for reference points. Frank Zappa surfaced briefly. Then something resembling Southern-fried jam-band looseness. Then traces of fusion. None of the comparisons held for very long, but the exercise itself felt revealing. Primus continues to occupy a space where familiar musical languages collide without fully becoming one another.
The bass remains central throughout. Slapped figures, popped accents, chordal gestures, and active melodic movement continually propel the arrangement forward. Meanwhile, Larry LaLonde often occupies a role that feels surprisingly understated given his importance to the band’s sound.
In many rock bands, the guitar naturally becomes the dominant instrument. Primus has always inverted that relationship. Throughout A Handful of Nuggs, LaLonde functions as a companion in putting the focal point on the bass, the guitar is a structural counterweight. Sustained harmonies, angular responses, unusual chord voicings, and textural layers create tension around the grooves Claypool establishes. Rather than fighting for control, the guitar circles the bass, adding color and instability without disrupting the orbit.
That dynamic helps explain why Primus can sound so intricate without becoming cluttered. Each instrument understands its place within the larger architecture.
Even the EP’s cover selection reinforces that architecture. Dio’s “Holy Diver” remains largely faithful to the original arrangement, and that restraint proves wise. Primus doesn’t attempt to radically reinvent a classic. Instead, it subtly redirects the listener’s attention.
The most noticeable difference isn’t the vocal interpretation or the guitar work. It’s the bass.
The original shuffle feel remains intact, but Claypool’s tone, articulation, and added fills gently reposition the song’s center of gravity. The arrangement remains recognizable, yet it increasingly feels filtered through Primus’s internal logic. The song bends toward the same musical priorities that define the rest of the EP.
The closing live version of “Duchess (And The Proverbial Mind Spread)” ultimately provides the strongest confirmation of the record’s central idea.
What is surprising about the performance wasn’t the improvisation. It was the consistency.
Remove the studio environment, place the band in front of an audience, and the same priorities immediately reappear. The bass still carries much of the melodic weight. The rhythm section still drives the conversation. The architecture survives the change in setting because the architecture was never dependent on the setting in the first place.
The vocal melody was already embedded within the movement of the bass line itself. Claypool wasn’t accompanying the melody. In many ways, he had already played it.
That observation feels revealing not only of this performance but of Primus as a whole.
The live recording repeatedly demonstrates how many musical responsibilities the bass is carrying simultaneously. Groove, melody, structure, commentary, and momentum all seem to pass through the same instrument. Meanwhile, Hoffman delivers a drum feature that reveals another strength of the current lineup. The patterns are sophisticated, yet each idea remains easy to follow. Even during moments of rhythmic complexity, the logic remains transparent enough that the audience can track the narrative unfolding in real time. You can hear that understanding reflected in the crowd’s response.
A Handful of Nuggs has guest appearances, a cover song, and strong songwriting and soloing. The reason to hit play and add it to the playlist is that Primus continues to trust an unusual musical premise. Most bands build upward from the rhythm section. Primus builds outward from it.
Four decades into its existence, that decision still generates sounds that feel slightly impossible, as though the rules governing much of rock music simply don’t apply here. The technique can be copied. The oddness can be copied. Even the humor can be copied. What proves far more difficult to replicate is the underlying design, the willingness to place the bass at the center of the universe and allow everything else to orbit around it.
By the end of the EP, I found myself returning to the simplest note I had written during the listening session: amazing bass player, very tight band.
On the surface, it feels almost too obvious a conclusion for music this intricate. Yet perhaps that’s precisely the point. Primus can build songs from compound meters, angular harmonies, shifting textures, and grooves that seem to mutate in real time, but none of it feels academic. What remains after the analysis fades is the sound of three musicians listening intensely to one another and constructing something few other bands would even think to attempt.
A Handful of Nuggs doesn’t reinvent the band’s musical philosophy. It doesn’t need to. It simply reminds us how compelling that philosophy remains, and how much creative possibility still exists when a band chooses to let the bass become the center of its universe. That’s the short of it!
