29th October 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Hungarian-born vocalist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Áron Siegler has been busy of late. Hot on the heels of the Glitching Sky EP – and I mean HOT, with a mere three weeks’ gap – The Pixel Rain drop their debut album, A Sense of Danger.
It seems that for him, like many of a creative bent, the current state of affairs, globally and domestically has not only instilled a sense of danger, but a sense of urgency. At the time of writing, the UK government has just taken down a number of its sites online due to a cyber security threat, but has added a new ‘survival’ page with a list of essential items it recommends every household has in stock in the event of war, a more extensive cyber attack, or extreme weather disrupting supply chains – including water and electricity. If we learned one thing from the pandemic, it’s that telling an entire population not to panic while giving guidance such as this is pretty much guaranteed to create just that.
This climate of fear and suspense, the sense that we’re perpetually on the cusp of something seismic provides a large part of the drive behind A Sense of Danger, of which Siegler says,
“The main theme was the anxiety about how our society is edging closer to its collapse through politics, social media or climate catastrophes, but there were more personal topics as well simultaneously about toxic relationships, jealousy and a haunting past. Both ‘storylines’ ended up connecting with each other and found their inevitable end by the end of the album, which became surprisingly bittersweet even to myself.”
The musical inspiration for the album is the two-part structure of New Order’s Brotherhood, and he approached the writing process with the idea of giving the record two complementary halves, using the distinction between darker and more uplifting electronic sounds as a loose creative framework rather than a rigid stylistic division. The result, we’re told ‘is a cohesive collection of eight songs that moves through varying shades of tension, urgency, melancholy and melodic warmth’.
Four of the album’s eight songs featured on the Glitching Sky EP, although interestingly, while three of the EP tracks appear in the first half, ‘The Glitching Sky’ is placed as the album’s penultimate track.
This means that EP track ‘Sacrifice’, which raises the curtain on the album, sweeps in with a mix of grandeur and tension. When covering the EP, I described it as an ‘anthem’, and placing it up front makes for a bold, attention-grabbing opening, and the expansive, cinematic ‘Last’ follows, pitching bleak imagery against a thumping dance beat and widescreen guitars and sweeping synths. The production is immense.
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The first of the previously unreleased tracks, ‘All the Lovers’ drives in hard and fast, with some cybergoth / techno drum machine and bubbling bass action. At this point, industrial-tinged goth that takes cues from early NIN and later Depeche Mode has been done and done and done, meaning the field is crowded, and while it might not be the most gripping of the album’s tracks, the quality of the songwriting and the production once again stand out here. The title track closes the first half in grand and ambitious style, with expansive layers of synth once again going wide over a rumbling bass. Here, Siegler’s vocal sounds at it most tense, capturing that anxiety and paranoia which defines the album’s focus – and at the same time, coming closest to a delivery reminiscent of Dave Gahan’s soulful baritone.
The second half certainly feels lighter, more poppy: the rolling tom sweeps which pan through ‘Danse Macabre’ are evocative of arena rock, and the song breaks out into a buoyant Europop bopalong. It sets the tone, and while it certainly fulfils the rubric of the album of two halves, the second, in its more dance-orientated vibes, feels like something of a let-down. Tension and release in itself is often a good thing, but this is feels more like jetting off on a beach holiday in Spain and forgetting all the shit back home. And yes, ‘Pieces of Love’ goes full New Order in the break toward the end.
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I always found New Order disappointing – not simply in the wake of their flight as Joy Division, but for the trajectory they took after their dark and tentative debut, Movement. I feel rather the same way about this album. Hearing ‘Glitching Sky’ in this context, it does sound like a euphoric dance reimagining of New Order’s ‘Temptation’. Thankfully, – I suppose – the last song, ‘All Night Long’ isn’t a cover of the Lionel Ritchie song. But it is a mid-tempo electro-ballad, and anticlimactic in comparison to the promise of the where we started. It is certainly an album of two halves.
Photo: Evalina Klimva
