Kim Salmon’s Smoked Salmon have confirmed the release of their new album Totally Sick!!, with Kim Salmon unveiling the second single Fully Sick And Tired ahead of the May 29 launch.
by Paul Cashmere
Kim Salmon has announced a new album with his current project Smoked Salmon, confirming that Totally Sick!! will arrive on Friday May 29, 2026. The news comes with the release of the album’s second single, Fully Sick And Tired, a track that continues the long running creative output of one of Australia’s most influential underground rock figures.
The album will be issued in several formats including a limited edition spewy green 12-inch vinyl pressing capped at 100 copies, standard black vinyl and digital editions. Fans can pre-order the album now, with Fully Sick And Tired available as an individual download or as an instant track for those purchasing the album in advance.
For Salmon, the new album sits within a long catalogue of work that stretches back almost five decades. The Perth-born musician first emerged in the late 1970s and has remained active through numerous bands including The Scientists, The Surrealists and The Beasts Of Bourbon. With Smoked Salmon he has created a flexible collective that allows him to record and perform with musicians drawn from several locations including Western Australia, New South Wales, France and his current home base of Melbourne.
According to the band’s description, Totally Sick!! plays with a recurring theme of illness, recovery and the everyday rituals around them. The album is framed as “songs for when you’re not feeling so good, songs for when you need to take a sickie, feeling fully sick, need a bit of a lie down, need something to get you on the road to recovery.”
The band adds that Salmon has been exploring these ideas across decades of work, noting that he has been writing songs about physical and metaphorical ailments “throughout the nineties, the naughties and now.”
The newly released single Fully Sick And Tired takes a slightly different angle within that theme. While the rest of the album’s material revolves around sickness or medicine, the track instead draws on the familiar Australian workplace tradition of taking a day off while claiming illness.
The band describes the song as revolving around “that great Aussie tradition of taking a sickie, enjoying simultaneously the pleasures of not being sick and not working.” The song blends a direct rock arrangement with melodic hooks and a spoken word interlude delivered in Salmon’s dry style.
Musically the track was written specifically for the album by Salmon and the band. It follows the earlier single Freudian Slippers, released in March on limited edition 7-inch vinyl, which previewed the direction of the forthcoming album. That single also included the B-side Seein’ Spots, a track not included on the album.
The Smoked Salmon project itself has an unusual origin. Salmon had long considered using the name but avoided it for decades before finally adopting it for a benefit concert for firefighters in early 2020. From that moment the name evolved into a broad creative banner under which Salmon could assemble musicians in different locations for touring or recording.
Rather than a fixed band line-up, Smoked Salmon functions as a concept and recording collective. The structure allows Salmon to move between collaborations while maintaining a unified identity for the music. That approach reflects the broader pattern of his career, which has frequently shifted between projects without settling permanently into a single group.
Salmon’s history in Australian music dates back to the emergence of the country’s first wave of punk. In Perth he formed The Cheap Nasties in the late 1970s, part of a parallel movement that also saw The Saints emerge in Brisbane, Radio Birdman in Sydney and Nick Cave’s early band The Boys Next Door form in Melbourne.
After The Cheap Nasties split, Salmon created The Scientists. The band initially combined punk energy with explosive pop structures, but by the early 1980s a new incarnation of the group had developed a darker and more primitive sound. Their music blended elements of punk, blues and psychobilly, creating a dense and distorted style that later observers connected to the grunge movement.
Years later bands including Mudhoney, Nirvana, Sonic Youth and The White Stripes cited Salmon’s work as an influence. Although those artists would achieve global commercial success in the 1990s and 2000s, the sonic foundations were already visible in the raw recordings produced by The Scientists during the previous decade.
Beyond his own bands, Salmon has performed with a wide range of international artists including The Stooges, Television, Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, The Cramps, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Pop Group and U2. Across that career he has moved between punk, rock, blues and experimental forms while maintaining a reputation for pursuing unconventional musical paths.
In recent years Salmon has revisited several chapters of that history. The classic line-up of The Scientists has returned to touring and recording, while The Beasts, the continuation of The Beasts Of Bourbon, have also released new material and completed national tours. Salmon has also staged Haunted Grooves, a performance project combining storytelling, images and songs reflecting on collaborators who have passed away.
At the same time Smoked Salmon has expanded internationally, touring Europe and Japan while presenting a setlist that mixes new material with selections from across Salmon’s earlier catalogue.
The album Totally Sick!! by Smoked Salmon will be released on Friday May 29, 2026.
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