London exploratory industrialist Luke Younger characterizes the creation of his latest collection, Axis, as a liberating return to roots: “It felt like going back to the beginning, it felt freeing.” Begun before the pandemic as a soundtrack to a dance performance, the initial vision was for something “visceral, with physical movement in mind.” When the project shifted to indefinite hiatus, he reimagined the material in the context of an LP, while retaining its sense of dynamic physicality. The result is grim and gripping, seasick throbs lurching in a low-ceilinged space, strafed with fractured clanging, hissing steam, and grinding spirals of granular haze. Noise in its most elevated and compelling form, from and for the body as much as the mind.
The album’s unique immediacy stems from Younger’s instinctual muse, reactivating raw methods with fresh energy. “I tuned back in to working with noise techniques again: more primitive equipment, cheap FX, contact mics, noise boxes.” Key guest contributions by Lucy Railton (cello), Mark Morgan of Sightings (guitar), Alex Tucker (vocals), and the late, legendary John Hannon (violin) further enrich the record’s bristling palette. Although half the tracks were begun pre-Covid at Hannon’s Essex studio, the rest were finished in Younger’s kitchen and living room during lockdown. The final tracks were then relayed to veteran mix specialist Randall Dunn, who further honed the material, adding a vivid spatial quality before entrusting the album to Stefan Betke (Pole) for final mastering.
From the hellscape metronome of “Moskito” to the insectoid warzone pulse of “Repellent” to the seething orchestral undertow of “Axis,” this is music of ominous gravity and worlds in peril. But it’s the closing cut, “Tower,” which Younger calls “perhaps the most dramatic piece of music I’ve ever made.” A lurking, blackened descension conjured on keys, guitar, and wormhole wah, the melody simmers and swells until suddenly exploding in a chaos of distorted blast beats. From their ashes the three-note riff slowly returns, like some astral dungeon synth exorcism, rising in a searing arc towards frenzied immolation before finally fading away in white fire and afterlife whispers.
LP / Digital Album
East Coast minimal wave institution Xeno & Oaklander’s seventh full-length further distills their iconic noir synth pop into a streamlined suite of gleaming, graceful retrofuturism. Inspired by ideas of synesthesia, scent, star worship, and obsolescent technologies, the duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride began conceiving the blueprint of Vi/deo while sequestered at their Southern Connecticut home studio during the pandemic. The context of isolation, streaming, and remote dreaming seeped into their chemistry, manifesting as both homage to and meditation on a certain cinematic strain of technicolor fantasy: the screen as stage, distance disguised as intimacy, where tragedy and glamor crossfade into one.
Opening with the precision synthetic melancholy of “Infinite Sadness,” the album marks a peak fluidity between the pair’s fusion of analog electronics and poetic melody, both refined and oblique, classic but contemporary. Wendelbo modeled her singing on “a young boy in a choir,” alternately holding notes and whispering them, with the lyrics clear, the voice elevated. McBride’s synthesizers serve as the perfect counterpart, tiered and polished, threading fluorescent architectures of a lost audio-visual age. Theirs is a darkwave of reverie and flickering city lights, swooning and sleek, romantic anthems for concrete bohemia, cigarette smoke in rainy gardens, and sound as color (“blue is fast and red is slow”). Vi/deo captures the bittersweet beauty of youth and utopias, the wistful transformation from miracle to memory, where love turns unreal and music becomes myth: “Sounds of the underground / Will echo in future days / Feelings of misery / Will fade into the haze.”
LP / CD / Digital Album
HIDE are an electronic duo based in Chicago. The pair create dark and heavy sample-based compositions using a combination of self-sourced field recordings and various pop culture and media references. Their music is textured, minimal, and powerful, giving raw vulnerability an opportunity to unfurl. Their work is honest, confrontational, powerful and thought-provoking.
HIDE’s third album, Interior Terror further abandons traditional concepts of song structure in favor of splintered rhythms and fevered, immediate release. Expanding on previous themes of autonomy and empowerment, Interior Terror addresses and questions the corporeal and immaterial body in a physical and metaphysical sense. Turning to the dread inside, reflecting on the world around us, HIDE gives voice to the power of destruction as a catalyst for hope, and to the collective experiences of those who’ve come before us as a wellspring of our own power. Raw vocal delivery of mantra-like prose issued forth yields a raging, plaintive wail that lulls, mocks, questions, proclaims and decries. A dearth of collected field recordings give way to more fluid arrangements while retaining a scathing urgency. The result is minimal, spacious, and jarring; a distant knocking grown into the pulse of a hypnotic dirge, drones emerge from shards of decomposed sound, bending, seething their way through your body.
LP / Digital Album
ADULT. make a triumphant return after their 2018 album This Behavior, dubbed “…one of the best records of their career…” by Ryan Lathan of Pop Matters. This chilling continuation takes the form of Perception is/as/of Deception, an anxiety fueled cyclone of pandemonium that only ADULT. would know how to harness. While This Behavior was recorded in the isolated snow-covered woods of northern Michigan, Perception is/as/of Deception was given life in a temporary space the duo created by painting their windowless basement entirely black, with the sole intention to deprive their senses, question their perceptions, and witness the resulting ramifications.
With over 23 years and a sprawling discography left in their wake, Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus have spent their entire career as ADULT. obscuring any defined genre or style. With a history as uncanny as ADULT., the pieces that make up Perception is/as/of Deception might be perceived as their most punk-infused and introspective work to date. The elements of frustration and apprehension that have consistently woven throughout their material are at full mast, although augmented by a strident and more “head-on” approach.
Tracks like Have I Started at the End successfully maintain the duo’s classic EBM signatures and synthesized aggression, cradled by a suspicious mantra that questions….what’s the point? Why Always Why offers a disorienting mutation of the heralded sounds of classic dance music, like a remix that escaped prison and is on the run. The dystopian anthem, Total Total Damage, comes in full force with an frantic energy which jolts any bystanders to attention, with only the defiant chants of Kuperus’ vocals outlining the ever-degenerating state of societal affairs. The dramatically glam synth parts scattered throughout the album, while at times ominous in nature, seem to also act as a merciful reminder that through the journey of Perception is/as/of Deception, one can still enjoy the chaos.
With the rampant sense of emptiness on the minds of many these days, there continues to be few attempts at scoring these common, unfortunate human qualities with pure sincerity. Thankfully, ADULT. has a long-standing reputation for creating the soundtrack for our insecurities, and Perception is/as/of Deception further solidifies their apprehensive position.
LP / Digital Album
Riki is the Los Angeles based dark synth-pop outfit commandeered by the mysterious Niff Nawor, a visual artist and musician active in the deathrock / anarcho-punk scenes of the California bay area (formerly a member of Crimson Scarlet), before founding her solo endeavor as Riki in 2017. Niff’s desire to explore her own sound manifested in the recording of the Hot City cassette tape in 2017, which featured Chelsey Crowley of Crimson Scarlet, Skot Brown of Phantom Limbs and Peđaof Doomed to Extinction. Released on Commodity Tapes and later reissued on vinyl by the well-regarded Symphony of Destruction label, Riki followed the release of the single with several small tours and festival dates, performing with such acts as Light Asylum, Black Marble, and Trisomie 21.
For her self-titled debut album for Dais, Riki explores courage, physicality, and romance across eight timeless synth pop anthems. Produced and engineered by hardware-based synthesist Matia Simovich of INHALT, influences and ideas are worn proudly without deviating from fresh and daring electro-pop territory. Nostalgic cues can be heard ranging from Neue Deutsch Welle, early Adrian Sherwood productions, classic ZYX Italo Disco, Japanese Visual Kei and even classic new wave/pop like Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, and early Madonna.
The lead single, Napoleon, contains Riki’s indelible sound design, reminiscent of 80’s New York dance floor electro-pop that recalls the fusion of uptown and downtown styles and culture, told through Riki’s present day West Coast narrative. For contrast, the second single entitled Böse Lügen (Body Mix) was previously released in demo form and re-mixed to emphasize its commanding presence and addictive nature. Translated simply to “Wicked Lies” and sung completely in German, Böse Lügen moves away from the upbeat romanticism found throughout the album and commands serious self-reflection guised within an infectious dance floor anthem.
Riki invites listeners to “reveal their useless habits of complacency and fear…and witness their own rebirth, a rhythm universal”.
LP / Digital Album
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