Tracks: February 18th, 2025

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Friends, it’s been a fucked up years thus far, both for those of us not in the US watching an our of control clown car catch fire and endanger everyone else on the road, and those unwillingly trapped in it. There’s nothing we can say here that will alleviate the dread and fear that folks are feeling at the moment, or any amount of sympathy that will be a salve on the gaping wounds that we’ve all sustained psychically, emotionally and socially. We’re as lost and horrified as you are, and don’t have any answers. We’re here and will stay doing what we do, and we hope that it can at least be a distraction from the daily horror-show, and maybe help your week start off a tiny bit better, or at least with some fresh new music you might not have heard otherwise.

Camlann

Camlann

V▲LH▲LL, “Calling For Storms”
It’s been nearly four years since we’ve had a new record from everyone’s favourite Swedish Mystery Vikings, but we’re now just a month and a half out from the release of Skymningsdjur, the fourth V▲LH▲LL LP. Preceding teaser tracks have ranged from heavily cinematic atmospheres to some suprisingly poppy beats, but on this new cut they’re connecting their roots in witch house with some classically charnal and chilling but still beat-focused dark electro.
Skymningsdjur by V▲LH▲LL

Xenturion Prime, “Leviathan Alpha”
Few bands in the synthpop end of the general European electro world could be said to be as maximalist as Xenturion Prime. Hell, even the name of the lead single from their forthcoming fifth LP, “Leviathan Alpha” is over the top, and the loping grandeur and vast vistas the track itself conjures delivers on the band’s high-gloss, high-drama ethos. Come for the grandiose, Tron-esque pads blended into some classic Swedish pop harmonies, stay for the Kansas cover on the B-side.
Leviathan Alpha by Xenturion Prime

Camlann, “Jungle Terror”
Our favourite Indonesian darkwave act Camlann has been on an absolute tear with their singles of late, venting serious spleen at industry creeps on “Ronny (Burn in Hell)” and working their best electropop instincts on “Numb and Hollow”. Their new one “Jungle Terror” is simultaneously one of their best pop-rock styled compositions and one of their most politically strident (and given their serious Marxist leanings that’s truly saying something); “Jungle Warfare” is a directly addressed to imperialist nations that have conducted wars in Southeast Asia, delivered with a kind of rare righteousness that is almost incongruous with how catchy it is. Camlann remain one of the most interesting acts we track simply by following their muse musically and speaking their minds plainly.
Jungle Terror by Camlann

Nghtly, “Timeshifted”
The Flowtape label’s still quite wet behind the ears, but they’ve assembled a solid roster of modern EBM talent for their second compilation, reaching from Bangkok to Glasgow and featuring names like Anti Yo and Filmmaker which should be very familiar to regular Tracks readers. We’re especially digging this new cut from Italy’s Nghtly, fresh off an appearance on an equally infectious Kindcrime tape. There’s a nice mix of chewy basslines, throwback rave colour, and plenty of lo-fi grit.
Survivors vol.2 by FLOWTAPE

Agony & the Middle Class, “Pig Cheese”
Agony & the Middle Class is the international industrial team-up of Dana Mukanova of Null Split, and Antoine Kerbérénès of Chrome Corps and Dague de Marbre. It’s got exactly the energy you might expect considering the folks involved, which is to say that it’s a combination of fast-moving chaotic EBM and some very classic eighties post-industrial weirdness. Just the name of the EP Pig Cheese summons some pretty odd images to mind, a fine match for the title track’s FM bass bounce and swooping detuned synths and samples, bringing the works of Cyborgs on Crack to mind. We’re always up for this sort of off-kilter strangeness in our industrial, it’s a vibe we don’t get nearly enough of in this day and age.
Pig Cheese by Agony & the Middle Class

Hugo Dirac, “Vein (Alen Skanner remix)”
We joked a little while ago that Mortal Kombat was a music genre unto itself, and that the number one artist currently producing it is Alen Skanner, but don’t take that as either a dismissal of the producer. Fact is that between a host of amazing originals and some choice remixes, Skanner has become one of our go-tos for music that perfectly lands between 90s techno/nrg and EBM, real Cyberpunk 2020 TTRPG shit in the best way. If you need an intro you can go to this recent remix for Hugo Dirac, taking the speedy hard-hitting original and taming it and punctuating it with just the right amount of sampled hits. Music to enter ABACABB on the title screen if we’ve ever heard it.
Hugo Dirac – Veil by Hugo Dirac

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Observer: éstudy & Dr. Oso

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éstudy
Wave of Resilience
Wie Ein Gott
Brooklyn-based producer éstudy has been all over the place in the last couple of years, putting out releases with Pildoras Tapes, Mosaique, Miseria and several others. The project’s first release on Wie Ein Gott Wave of Resilience is as good a place to familiarize yourself with the project as any, providing handy examples of the various styles and modes that éstudy has touched on. Opener “Watch Your Step” is a hefty slice of industrial techno that doesn’t skimp on the industrial part of the equation, reinforcing its lockstep cymbals and kicks with machinegun snares, metallic percussion and manic 16th note sequences that cinch the tension early. Alternately “Tip Toe Around” is a more straightforward techno number, propelled by a simple kick-hi-hat-snare pattern and atonal synths, with ghostly and menacing ambience that surrounds it’s stuttering vocal samples and warbly bass. As a change of pace “Feel the Wave” goes for a more rocklike arrangement, with the bass and drums feeling more loose and elastic, the addition of more rigid and mechanical passages throwing the song’s contrasts into sharp relief. Intriguingly, “Don’t Press that Button” forgoes most techno markers but keeps the atmospherics, landing somewhere in body music territory, albeit with some tweaky synths and syncopated drums to offset the minimalism of its melody, a balancing act that points to éstudy’s studied approach to production.
Wave Of Resilience by éstudy

Dr. Oso - Hooligan Beat
Dr. Oso
Hooligan Beat
self-released
The elevator pitch on the new EP from Dr. Oso couldn’t be better suited to grab our attention if someone spent years poring over the ID:UD archives in order to target a release just for us: Argentinian body music with a heavy new beat influence which draws upon the intoxicated violence of football hooliganism. Niche? Of course. Immediate and playing out exactly like what you’d expect something with that pitch to sound like? Definitely. Lo-fi, dead-simple, and speedy EBM rhythms with some icy new beat pads and a healthy dollop of acid make up the lion’s share of Hooligan Beat. Eschewing both anhalt and mutant EBM for a decidedly swampy and burpy sound, tracks like “Trench Fight” and “Lager Dance” get a good amount of mileage out of heavy sampling and rapidly arpeggiating bass. Sure, some of the tracks here feel a bit long and underwritten, but when you have Millwall FC’s infamous “no one likes us, we don’t care” chant being chopped up and stabbed in between staccato, rubbery basslines which sound straight out of 1993, who cares? Factor in an on-brand remix from Chrome Corps & Einhander, projects definitely in sync with Dr. Oso’s ethos (and for some reason a remix of Gang Of Four’s “To Hell With Poverty”?) and you’re just a few tins of Carling away from a riot.
HOOLIGAN BEAT by Dr. Oso

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We Have A Technical 545: Heart Shaped Pizza Pockets

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Carter Tutti Void

Carter Tutti Void are reading you for those shoes.

It’s time for a Pick Five episode, dear listener, and as luck would have it it’s also time for a particular time, or at least records suited specifically to 3am (eternal). What is a 3am record? We have a few different reads on that as you’ll find out, as well as some comments on Ministry and And One tour news. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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Ye Gods, “The Arcane & Paranormal Earth”

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Ye Gods
The Arcane & Paranormal Earth
self-released

Antoni Maiovvi has operated under many musical guises since his emergence in the late 2000s as one of the pillars of the italo disco revival. Amongst his numerous projects, the last several years have seen the UK-born, US-based artist working as Jason Priest, an alias for his tuneful post-punk material, Pleasure Model for his conceptual techno works, and as Ye Gods, an outlet for ambient ritual electronics. Distinct from Maiovvi’s other endeavours, the material on The Arcane & Paranormal Earth is meditative and trancelike, with subtly articulated layers of noise, synths and hypnotic percussion that produce both dreamy detachment and conscious stimulation. 

Maiovvi states in the liners for the album that Ye Gods is him at his most sincere and least veiled as a artist, and despite the record’s abstract nature that holds true in the listening; while certainly esoteric in nature, these ambient and occasionally glitchy compositions do have a real directness, always materially present and never fully inscrutable. Like Coil circa Musick to Play in the Dark (one of the closest points of comparison musically), and as suggested by the title of the album, the arcane is kept in balance with earthly concerns. Hence, although opener “Darashim” is made up of intersecting layers of static, rising drones and a simple repeating rhythm loop, you have Maiovvi’s voice repeating “Let the light pour from your skull” in mantra-like fashion, varying slightly in delivery to anchor it and offset its abstraction. 

It’s not just the vocalizations that maintain the balance between the transcendental and somatic sides of these records, but the actual construction of the numbers themselves. “Aksum” foregoes any kind of identifiable percussion and rhythm for pure textures, but the static that shapes the song’s structure provides a tangible means to navigate its vast reverbs and distant pads, the feedback recalling the measurable and predictable qualities of pure sound as an instrument unto itself. Similarly, the sinister whispers of “Of Venus & Adonis” and its hissy, liquid percussion are accompanied by almost imperceptible snatches of bubbly programming that subconsciously connect its unfolding and twisting electronics, reinforcing Maiovvi’s repeated question “Of what substance are you made?”, and rendering it non-rhetorical. 

If all this sounds a touch metaphysical, well, it’s a record that deliberately addresses the very human experience of interacting with the intangible from the corporeal world. The success of The Arcane & the Paranormal Earth lies in how it involves the listener in that discourse, and while it’s certainly rooted in Maiovvi’s own interactions with those broad concepts, it has an ease of listening that keeps it stimulating through repeated listens in and out of order. Apparently the first of three comparable releases from Ye Gods in 2025, it’s a foundational release that establishes a vast landscape of musical ideas to explore, and the ways innumerable ways we can engage with them. 

Buy it.

The Arcane & Paranormal Earth by Ye Gods

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grabyourface, “Sadgirl Mixtape”

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grabyourface - Sadgirl Mixtape

grabyourface
Sadgirl Mixtape
self-released

grabyourface, the project of French producer/singer Marie Lando, has been many things: a noisy outlet of emotional catharsis, a poised and swaggering portrait of pure industrial cool and charisma, and an instantly recognizable and distinct personality on collabs with the likes of Covenant and Caustic. But nothing in the past six or seven years in which we’ve been tracking grabyourface prepared us for the arrival of Sadgirl Mixtape, a bracing listen whose musical variance is only matched by its brutal, raw wrestling with depression and despair.

“You Will Never Be Happy” was a warning shot we all should have heeded – when a song featuring the refrain “Nothing has made sense for years now/ Only death will set me free” is chosen as a single, it might be because there simply isn’t any cheerier fare to be found on a record which walks the walk its title points to. There’s nothing here but bad road, from breakups (“If you wanna hold my hand you’re gonna drown, too” Lando warns on “My Last Act Of Love”) to existential despair (on “Rain On The Car Roof”, she reasons her way towards the impossibility of day to day life: “You live with the dread, but act like you don’t, and above all be thankful, people have it so much worse than you”). Lando’s vocals, ranging from pure exhaustion on “Car Roof” to an abused numbness on “I Dream Of A Future Without You”, never fall into repetition or cliche; throughout the gruelling hour-long affair there’s never any doubt that they’re a pure rendering of something real, something intimately felt.

That sense of immediacy and conviction is carried over to the musical side of the record by virtue of its origins and construction. The “mixtape” in the title isn’t just a clever nod to the idea of distilling every emotion music can produce within you into a dense package – it’s an acknowledgement of the piecemeal construction of the release, having been written and recorded at separate intervals over the past seven years. That gestation period hasn’t just provided Lando with the emotional reserves needed to write and record these pieces, it’s also allowed each individual track to build up its own aesthetic edifice and interiority. The pitting of confessional singer-songwriting strumming against cinematic bombast on “The Black Of My Hoodie” has precious little in common with the dissociated darkwave of “Bubbles Of Me”, in which Lando’s narcotized voice drifts through liquid, waltzing synths. In recording, structure, and influence, Sadgirl Mixtape is genre-fluid (like any good mixtape should be), touring through electro, metal, hyperpop, downtempo and, yes, emo.

If you were drawn into darker music as a teenager (and are old enough to have experienced full albums as your primary musical medium), you probably have memories of records by your favourite artists – be they Joy Division, The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, or My Chemical Romance – which concluded with depressing epics which were intimidating in both their grandeur and their intimacy. To listen to those records all the way through to those closing tracks meant voluntarily signing up for an emotional gut punch you both dreaded and needed to feel in order to know that someone, somewhere, had felt the way you did. Lando might be being arch by describing Sadgirl Mixtape as her “emo offering”, but she’s also well aware that she’s delivering an experience made entirely of those resonant, harrowing epics from start to finish with absolutely no respite. Sadgirl Mixtape is pure, uncut pain, but the strength of each individual, self-contained jewel of miserablism makes it the first truly great record of the year. Highly recommended.

Buy it.

Sadgirl Mixtape by grabyourface

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Tracks: February 10th, 2025

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Another Bandcamp Friday’s come and gone – we’re not sure if it’s just us but it seems like the rush on artists’ part to get some sort of new material out the door each and every time BC Friday comes up has died off. The fact that charity initiatives are still a part of it is nice, though truth be told we’re just thankful that, touch wood, BC’s new owners haven’t messed with the platform much since the 2023 layoffs. On with this week’s tracks.

John McKay

John McKay

HIDE // estoc, “The Wheel Spins Onward Paradise Locked Behind a Gate”
Chicago’s brutalist noise and disgust purveyors HIDE join forces with Philadelphia techno producer estoc for “The Wheel Spinds Onward Paradise Locked Behind a Gate”, a benefit for Seraj Aburaida and his family, displaced by the ongoing bombing of the West Bank by Israeli forces. As expected with HIDE it’s a rough ride from the first gasp with plenty of distortion and sharp-edged textures, although there’s a hypnotic rhythm built into the rhythm programming, which contains some sneaky fills and rolls orbiting the annihilating kick. No less vicious than you would expect possibly moreso.
THE WHEEL SPINS ONWARD PARADISE LOCKED BEHIND A GATE by HIDE // estoc

Devours, “Loudmouth”
Sometimes it’s a little scary pressing play on a new track from Vancouver’s synthpop gaylien Devours. Given how much the music that the project has put out in the last 5 years has meant to us personally, and the incredible consistency that basically finds each new sad, funny, beautiful synthpop gem that drops become a new favourite, it’s hard not to worry that some day it just won’t hit the same. Then you press play on a track like “Loudmouth” (from the forthcoming Sports Car Era) and all those fears are assuaged. Just the best, every single time.

Crush Of Souls, “Cult Of Two”
Hearing that Charles Rowell of Crocodiles had relocated to Paris to pursue a synth-driven project came as a surprise to us a couple of years ago, but with the follow up to Crush Of Souls’ debut (A)Void Love on the docket, it’s apparent that this switch is a permanent one. More importantly, the pair of teaser tracks for Lézire find Rowell lounging comfortably about in his new climes and pushing its boundaries a bit, with a mix of vintage dark synthpop and crooning which puts us somewhat in mind of Kindest Cuts.
Lézire by CRUSH OF SOULS

Rare DM, “The Ring”
There’s always been a sharp and droll candour to Rare DM’s songwriting which has served as a pleasant counterpoint to the smooth and club-ready style of darkwave plied by Erin Hoagg, whether it takes the form of odes to fuckboys or luxury suites. New single “The Ring” is no exception in that regard, with “fuck around and find out” warnings about the titular horror franchise being delivered atop wormy and engrossing programming.
The Ring by Rare DM

Sacred Skin, “The Lights (HEALTH remix)”
Los Angeles new-new wavers Sacred Skin absolutely slayed with their second full length Born in Fire last year, and have released a single for one its many standouts “The Lights”. It’s basically a perfect fit for HEALTH to remix, with it being the exact style of sad, slow-rolling number that the fêted noise-rockers deal in themselves. Extra drums, extra layers of programming and some pleasingly atonal bits of synth really bring out a different side from the smooth, neon-lit original.
The Lights by Sacred Skin

John McKay, “Flare”
Lastly, an out of the blue, entirely unexpected archival release is in the wings from John McKay, who played guitar on the first two Siouxsie & The Banshees records (and notably wrote the lion’s share of the music on first LP The Scream). Apart from one single with the Zor Gabor project in 1987, McKay’s effectively maintained radio silence since an acrimonious split from Siouxsie & co. nearly 45 years ago, making the prospect of a record of archival recordings from across the 1980s a fascinating document to those of us invested in how the likes of Andy Gill, Johnny Marr, and (McKay’s replacement in the Banshees) John McGeoch pioneered post-punk guitar playing and composition.
Sixes And Sevens by John McKay

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Observer: dormnt & Crystal Geometry

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dormnt
pointfive
self-released
dormnt is the project of Vancouver producer Anthony McGillivray, who also operated in a glitchier, if no less atmospheric style as Urusai in the mid to late 2000s. The thread tying together McGillivray’s releases has always been an emotional one, with the use of subtle electronic movements that flow into one another, sometimes punctuated by percussion and, sometimes in washes of pure ambience. The latter approach is exmplified by “Ephemeral”, the opener of new EP pointfive; while there’s a pulsing rhythm that courses through the track, it rarely rises above the surface of the vast, melancholic pads, held down by their expanse and weight. Even on the more beat-oriented cuts like “Eidetic”, it’s the slowly evolving textures that flow around the anxious kicks and cymbal-hits that dictate structure, only briefly falling into step with the percussion before melting back down into atmosphere. McGillivray’s strength as a producer is creating intensity in those alternately wistful and pensive moods; the noisy edge that creeps into the sweeping sounds of “Fraught” convey the feeling suggested by the title through inference, tension as a function of a vast and ungraspable unease. While dormnt’s music is by its nature amorphous, its impact is fully tangible.
pointfive by dormnt

Crystal Geometry - Riot Dogs
Crystal Geometry
Riot Dogs
Bloc Noir
The range of techno, industrial, and metal influences Maxime Fabre is going to bring to any new Crystal Geometry release should be familiar to regular readers of this site or anyone who’s been keeping their head on a swivel since the fantastic breakthrough of 2020’s Senestre. New EP Riot Dogs is a bracing and tight reiteration of Crystal Geometry’s core strengths. A bit more down the classic techno pipe than anything we’ve heard from Fabre in a minute (and distinct from the wooziness of last LP From The Rave To The Grave), the four cuts here don’t sacrifice any of the dense, percussive gallop Fabre always brings while working some lighter touches into the corner of still-pummelling productions. “Kanellos” does a great job of augmenting classic liquid techno and trance programming with some softer guitar picking, while we get some of the gabber and metal chug in the the style of recentEP Antithèse kicking against ghostly programming on “Loukanikos”. Keeping those subtler dynamics in play while still absolutely assaulting the listener with dense brutality is one of the hallmarks of Fabre’s best work. and when you factor in the EP’s unifying theme of wild dogs’s propensity to join riots around the world (to play fast and loose with the treble clef mnemonic, every good boy bites cops) it’s impossible not to get caught up in the maelstrom of this EP.
Riot Dogs by Crystal Geometry

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