Artist: The Mystic Tide
Title: Frustration
Label: Numero Group
Release date: February 16, 2024
Compilation/Reissue producers: Alec Palao, Douglas McGowan, Ken Shipley, Rob Sevier
Audio restoration & mastering: Michael Graves (Osiris Studio)
Some bands leave behind a tidy catalog. The Mystic Tide left a handful of painfully rare 45s—and a sound that feels bigger than its footprint. On Frustration, Numero Group finally pulls the full arc of this Long Island quartet into one place: a raw-nerved collision of Merseybeat push, surf-noir shadow, and full-tilt garage-psych abrasion that collectors have been chasing for decades.
What makes Frustration hit so hard isn’t just the fuzz and the frenzy—it’s the feeling of a young band reaching past their means and landing somewhere genuinely singular. Numero’s deep-dive story on the group frames it perfectly as “the power of the amateur”: a suburban, middle-class Long Island band with no scandal, no mythology—just an outsized sense of urgency in the grooves.
Restoring Frustration at Osiris Studio
For this release, the goal was straightforward: make these historic sides feel immediate—without sanding off the edges that made them matter in the first place. The Mystic Tide’s original singles were meant to be brash, unstable, and emotionally forward. Bringing them together into a cohesive album required careful restoration and mastering choices, track-to-track consistency, and respect for the violent little bursts of energy that define the band’s best moments.
If you’ve only encountered The Mystic Tide as whispered-about collector lore, Frustration turns the myth into a full-bodied listen—refurbished in best-ever sound and finally presented as the complete statement it always deserved to be.