13th March 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Polevaulter are very much a band of the times. The cost of living and the fact bands make no money has driven a marked shift towards duos and power trios, and notably electronic music and drum machines have become popular again. The less kit you’ve got, the easier it is to rehearse at home or in a small space, there’s less to the logistics of getting a smaller number of people with minimal gear around (hell, the logistics of getting people in the same place at the same time around work and family and all that shit), and any fees and proceeds from merch are split fewer ways. Necessity and invention, and all that. And notably, there’s a lot of angry electro-led noise coming out of the north. Benefits are clearly up there in representing this thing, which isn’t anything like a movement, any more than the emerging goth scene in the 80s was a movement, but an artistic current, a zeitgeist. But we also have the likes of The Sick Man of Europe, Machine Mafia, and Polevaulter. These guys are something of the exception, in that they’re a shade dancier, but given the buzzing bass fury and relentless rage in the vocals, they’re never going to trouble any regular townie nightclubs, let alone any charts or Radio 1 Dance.
On the new EP, Polevaulter frontman Jon Franz said, “’Descending’ is our most cohesive and controlled EP, and also the most raw and direct. We wanted to reach people immediately, give them something to quickly digest and then say exactly what we wanted to say. The vocals start quick in each song. It progresses down through the EP into an anxious rave, the themes about being lied to all your lives and believing what you are told coming from power down to the working people. It’s our darkest and danciest EP I think.”
And so it is that with Descending, Polevaulter deliver four ultra-taut and super-succinct slabs of electro-led abrasion. ‘The Cursor is a Fly’ makes for a comparatively gentle introduction, before the grinding ‘Dogtrack’.the woozy, bulbous subsonic bass is pure dance, but the snarling, disaffected vocal is punk to the core, Franz wheezing ‘Just trying to buy a house, now let me have it… dogtrack… gamble… run down… dogtrack… going round and round and round…’ It’s bleak and hypnotic and bleak and hypnotic and… you get the picture.
‘Manifest’ mines a dark dance groove with a vocal that’s bordering on spoken word, and calls to mind the short-lived and criminally underrated York band Viewer, the technoindie collaboration between the late cult techo legend Tim Wright and vocalist AB Johnson. In other words, it’s a well-balanced hybrid, where thumping beats and techno synths collide with a vocal that draws influence from Jarvis Cocker and Mark E. Smith. ‘I’m going down with the ship’, Franz announced against a clattering backdrop of snashing metallic snare drum detonations and rapidly-shifting synth gyrations.
The final track, ‘Soothsayer’, is the EP’s longest, and a sparse, haunting intro paved the way for a dark, reverb-heavy electrogoth groove with hushed, hypnotic vocals over an almost subliminal bass groove cut through with a heartbeat kick drum and smashing snare and builds to a tense, suffocating climax.
These are dark times, and it is definitively grim up north. Polevaulter provide a soundtrack to this, while countering bleak nihilism with some almost euphoric dance synths. Descending offers escapism in the same space as the darkest pessimism. The conflicts and contradictions are navigated successfully, though. Polevaulter have taken a massive leap here, and really gone beyond their previous works.
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Aural Aggravation 