Soul Coughing Launches New Website With Mysterious Countdown

“We said it would never happen” appears atop a billboard purportedly located in Southern California that includes the address for a newly launched Soul Coughing website. Co-founding frontman Mike Doughty’s website redirects to the Soul Coughing page, which has a mysterious countdown timer set to expire tomorrow.

Soul Coughing formed in New York City in 1992. The band consisted of Doughty on guitar and lead vocals, Mark De Gli Antoni on keyboards, Sebastian Steinberg on bass and Yuval Gabay on drums. The short-lived group’s sound incorporated elements of jazz, funk, hip-hop, and electronic music and was marked by hypnotic beats and samples, as well as Doughty’s poetic, sometimes cryptic lyrics.

Soul Coughing’s debut album, Ruby Vroom, was released in 1994. The band’s second album, Irresistible Bliss arrived in 1996. A third and final Soul Coughing album, El Oso, came out in 1998.

Soul Coughing broke up in 2000, with its members pursuing various other interests and Doughty launching a successful solo career. Following disbandment, Doughty spoke disparagingly about his tenure with Soul Coughing, which was marred by substance abuse. Doughty described the tumultuous time and acerbic relationship with his bandmates in various interviews and in his 2012 memoir, The Book of Drugs.

“I get more and more afraid that a reunion is going to be forced upon me at knifepoint,” Doughty told The Village Voice in 2009. “I don’t need money that bad. I swear to god. To become a billionaire … OK. If they poked out one my eyes, I would reform Soul Coughing so they didn’t poke out the other one.”

“Soul Coughing was an abusive marriage full of emotional violence and I have no interest in stuff I wrote years before I met those guys, it’s heartbreaking,” Doughty told the OC Weekly in 2012. “Lots of people are Soul Coughing fans, I am not … I was very dumb hanging out with those guys, because they just didn’t like me from the jump. They really were very cruel to me in a lot of ways, put me down in a big way, and I believed them.”

“I don’t just think ‘meh,’ I openly dislike [Soul Coughing music],” Doughty told MTV in 2012. “I’ve been in bars when somebody will misguidedly put on a Soul Coughing CD and I will frantically run away with my skin crawling, in near physical pain. I just really dislike the music.”

Despite those previous sentiments, Doughty frequently incorporates Soul Coughing songs into his solo live performances. Doughty recently formed Ghost of Vroom with his longtime collaborator, bassist Andrew “Scrap” Livingston. Their debut album was released in 2021 and its follow-up came out in 2023. Mike Doughty performed with Sebastian Steinberg for the first time in 22 years at Largo in Los Angeles in February of 2022 for Watkins Family Hour.