Posts Tagged ‘Leeds’

A Void / Mango in Euphoria / Hitlist – Wharf Chambers, Leeds, 19th June 2026

Posted: 21 June 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

The phrase ‘local band’ still carries negative connotations, despite the fact that practically every band is local to somewhere. Of course, the main criticism when it comes to the application of the term ‘local’ is the implicit issue of their failure to travel further afield to grow their audience. Historically, it carried with it the notion that the band weren’t good enough to get gigs elsewhere. Concurrent with, and somewhat contradictory to, this – and I suppose we’re largely going back to the music press of the 80s and 90s – was the London-centric nature of coverage of live music. Occasionally bands from, say, Manchester, Sheffield, or Leeds would get a rare look-in, but it’s not hard to see why bands who wanted to ‘make it’ would move to London. The north was perceived as quaint, parochial, and peripheral, and largely of less consequence.

It’s quite the paradox that many bands could cultivate a career without ever travelling outside the M25. No-one ever beefed that bands who never, or rarely, played outside London were just ‘local’ bands. Then again, to an extent, it’s a question of scale. It’s possible to play in London four times in a week and still not reach all of the potential fanbase. The same can’t be said of somewhere like, say, Lincoln, or Stoke, or even Nottingham. In this context, it’s understandable why smaller London-based bands don’t feel the need to travel further afield much or often, particularly in the current economic climate, when the cost of fuel alone is likely to outstrip the proceeds of door takings and merch sales, without considering sustenance and accommodation.

As such, we’re incredibly privileged to receive two – two – London-based, French-derived bands hitting Leeds together. Both have been on my wishlist for a while, having followed both online for some years now. The last time A Void played Leeds was 2021, and although they ventured north to play York earlier this year, following the departure of the latest in their ‘rotating cast’ of drummers, they played an acoustic set, and superb as it was, it wasn’t the full-throttle grunge blast I’d spent so long yearning for. And now co-founding bassist Aaron Hartmann has departed (as in left, not died), meaning they’re showcasing a brand new – ‘temporary’ – lineup. Which feels a bit harsh, but we’ll come to all of this presently.

First up, and early doors, Hitlist deliver punchy punky alt-rock songs with solid choruses and strong hooks – and some flamboyant slap bass breaks. They have some really nice melodic guitar parts woven into the songs, and play with confidence. Their set is well-considered, and they get harder and faster towards the end. The drummer moans loudly between songs, as if he’s in serious pain or perturbation. It is absolutely fucking boiling mind. And it only gets hotter as the night progresses.

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Hitlist

Mango in Euphoria are pure class from the very start, and they’re straight in with some big glammy grooves. The new, all-female five-piece lineup is sounding fantastic (the high tom being louder than the rest of the drums notwithstanding, but that’s pedantry on my part) – tight, together, with a bright, metallic guitar sound and the synths adding no small dynamic variation. They’re also fully committed to the image, too – none more so than Mango herself in her strikingly slinky getup, and nothing you may have seen in terms of footage on the Internet fully conveys the wild force of nature she is on stage. Throwing poses galore and chucking herself about all over, you’d think this was a 1,500 capacity arena rather than a 150-capacity indie venue with a worryingly bouncy stage. It’s quite the show, alright.

‘5th Year’ is a straight up power ballad. The set flies in the blink of an eye. ‘Lovestruck’ lands as the penultimate song, and it’s epic – the atmospherics and sultry beats of the studio version switched up to chunky, rockin’ dark pop beast before they close with ‘Hollywood’, and they slay it.

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Mango in Euphoria

A Void power in with a swift one-two of ‘One of a Kind’ and ‘Sick as a Dog’ from their last album, Dissociated. Next up, the first of the new songs is particularly hard and driving, reminiscent in parts of Solar Race, only with some straight up metal riffery. It’s apparent just how much the songwriting – and musical capabilities – of the band have evolved since 2018’s Awkward and Devastated. New drummer Mave is a hard hitter, while bassist Lauren lunges towards the crowd and plays with total commitment. And the rapport and banter between the three is a joy. There’s also some remarkably candid chat, and we learn that the album-in-progress since 2023 has been recorded no fewer than three times due to lineup changes whereby new members have brought something different to the songs.

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A Void

They’re all absolutely melting up there, and Camille laments her choice of a velour tracksuit-type getup which is likely the clothing equivalent of a portable sauna. Because this is A Void, there are elements of chaos throughout – Camille upends her pedal board several times, and the drum kit and stool require constant adjustment, and there’s always a sense that anything could happen at any moment. But they manage to keep it together to the end, closing an hour-long set with a boisterous rendition of ‘Stepping on Snails’, and in typical form, Camille celebrates by lying on her back and waving her legs in the air. I’d have responded in kind if I wasn’t encumbered by a pint and a camera and being of an age where I’d likely struggle to get up again. That said, the number of older blokes in the room – I’m talking 60+, rather than 50+ – is somewhat strange, but bands don’t choose their audiences, and there are also a lot of women under thirty here, too. But I digress as my brain slowly melts and I find myself transitioning to a liquid form… this was one of those crazy, sticky, intense summer gigs that stand out, and those of us who were there will be telling people about it in years to come.

The 113 / Mince / Disappear – The Fulford Arms, York, 6th May 2026

Posted: 7 May 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Generally speaking, the role of the journalist is to tell the story while staying out of the picture, although Hunter S. Thompson redefined the role of the journalist when he invented gonzo. In the main, I try to remain in the shadows (quite literally), particularly when it comes to live reviews, but sometimes, there’s a narrative switch that simply could not have been anticipated that drags you into the story as a participant, rather than an observer.

“Last time we were here, we got called ‘shouty shit indie’”, says the main singer from Mince, four songs or so songs into their set. It’s true, that did happen, and I stand by that description, too. Given that the last time they were here was April last year, supporting Gans, it would seem it’s niggled them a bit. But, if you’re going to get up in front of people, don’t expect everyone to love it. At least it was no Dream Nails scenario.

Before we move forward, let’s first go back, back, back. The reason I’m here is because The 113, from Leeds, have just released their second EP, The Hedonist, and it’s nothing short of explosive. The real test of a band is whether they can cut it live, though. So now they’re out on the road, grafting – not grifting – and York on a Wednesday night is always going to be a test for an up-and-coming band working to build their fanbase.

It’s not heaving, but there’s a respectable turnout, and first on are Disappear, who trade in jangly country-flavoured indie with a hint of shoegaze. They don’t use plectrums, and the singer / guitarist demonstrates some interesting playing technique. It doesn’t always hit the mark, and the same is true of the off-key approximation of singing. The drummer keeps having to get out from behind his kit to adjust the guy’s guitar pedals, too, which is just weird. They can play, but the songs are uninspired and uninspiring. Toward the end of the set there’s a song that sounds like The Wedding Present circa Bizarro, but again, it’s let down by the vocals. As a band, they aren’t terrible, but I can’t in all conscience say they were any good. The drummer – who is impressive – needs to be in a better band.

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Disappear

And so Mince inform the crowd – who are largely enthusiastic, in fairness – about the review of the last time they were here. I stand by that description, although in fairness, there’s a bit more to it than that: there’s some 60s psych in the mix, and plenty of energy to the performance, too. They have two vocalists – the first, with mop-top haircut, wigs out while playing guitar, while the second paces petulantly, swaggers, and gives it all that. But after maybe three songs, he mostly sits or squats at the back of the stage beside the drum kit, scratching his forehead with his mic and rubbing his face, looking knackered, and stays largely quiet. After coming hard out of the traps, it’s as if he’s out of energy and given up, while the rest of the band thrash on. It’s a bit odd, and oddest of all is that it’s an exact rerun of their previous show here, and on balance they’re better when he takes a back seat (literally).

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Mince

The 113 have built considerable momentum, and fast. Their debut EP, To Combat Regret was released just over a year ago, and The Hedonist continues that arc of nihilistic post-punk aggro delivered with visceral energy. How would it translate live, and how would they fill a headline slot? It turns out they’ve got a solid album’s worth of material, which comfortably fills an hour with no long-winded waffle. They don’t need to pause for political platforming, or pass sociopolitical comment, since it’s all there in the song, which they pack in tightly. And they do so it a nonchalant confidence, too: they’ve got their sound absolutely nailed, and it’s a thick, dense sound, and crisp drums cut through, punchy percussion played with perfect precision. Much of the guitar work is sculpted feedback, but there are steely chords overlaid with sinewy lead parts, and there are times when I’m reminded of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, another of Leeds’ finest from when the city was the spawning ground of the goth scene that emerged from post punk.

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The 113

They’re electric from start to finish, slamming in with ‘Leach’, and play with an urgency that’s impossible to manufacture. Each band member brings something specific, the towering bassist lurking in the background hammers out hefty grooves. The guitarist plays so hard he busts his A string four songs in, and because they’re not about to let up the momentum, takes another four songs to finally manage to replace it. They simply don’t pause for breath, they keep their heads down and blast them out. ‘When I Leave’ is a mid-set standout, and ‘Entertainment’ is nothing short of scorching. Set closer ‘Conscience’ is a lacerating blast and bang, that’s it, done. The 113 are a band who have got everything down – they hit hard, clinical, brutal, high impact. They’re already making inroads into Europe, and things will likely be quite different come this time next year…

A Forest of Stars – Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface

Posted: 4 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Prophecy Productions – 8th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I seem to be on something of an inadvertent black metal trip this bank holiday weekend, and, peculiarly, one devoted to black metal forged on this small island, for following my review of Hellripper’s Coronach – black metal that’s staunch in its Scottishness – we have Prophecy Productions pitching the new album from West Yorkshire (Leeds, of course, where else) act A Forest of Stars as being uniquely British in their branding.

It’s tempting to unpack the importance of national identities here, particularly at a time when ‘British’ identity – at home, far more than away – carries some toxic connotations, and the majority of Scots are keen to claim independence from the government of the United Kingdom – in short, to become dis-united, but this is such complex and boggy terrain that there simply isn’t the time or space, even if it were appropriate here. And so I will return to the seemingly flippant word selection concerning ‘British branding’, for while – as is a central trope of black metal – A Forest of Stars’ album titles are strewn with corpses, death, and decay (their debut was entitled, perhaps somewhat oxymoronically, The Corpse of Rebirth, while their last was called Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes, which sounds probably more humorous in its punning wordplay than intended), Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface sounds like corporate speak. If a there was multinational corporation that dominated the industry of funeral directors, Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface could well be the title of a report for the executive committee. Or perhaps Pure Cremation have already written it and had that meeting concerning their strategy in the event of another pandemic, replete with an array of graphs and graphics, pie charts and flow charts, costings and projections. Because capitalism exploits everything there is to exploit.

As such, the language of capitalism sits very much at odds not only with a metal band, but a band so immersed in art and poetry, whose biography goes to significant effort to point out that ‘in his recitative mode, vocalist Curse is even reminiscent of electro poet Anne Clark – after a steady diet of prescription drugs and rusty nails. On the other hand, his singing voice evokes memories of a young Martin Walkyier. The impressive command of the English language by that great metal bard, his plentiful plays on words and subtle multi-layered meanings also have a place in the poetic lyrics of A FOREST OF STARS – yet in different, often far more neo-dadaist ways, in which tiny twists of spelling can have surprisingly dark effects’ (suggesting, at the same time, that the wordplay of Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes was entirely intentional after all).

The regular release of the album contains six songs, the shortest of which is the opener, ‘Ascension of the Clowns’ at a hefty nine minutes, and with the last two stretching beyond the fifteen-minute mark. The deluxe edition adds three more tracks – by most standards, an additional EP, or even an album of bonus material.

‘Ascension of the Clowns’ is grand and theatrical: Curse brings the metal fury, but emotes and enunciates, his words not only audible but clear above the spacious guitar work – which, over the course of the album’s expansive compositions – are accompanied by an array of instruments from piano to violin, as well as acoustic guitar. There’s a strong orchestral leaning – not to mention folk elements – to incredibly ambitious work, and it’s hard to fault the musicianship or arrangements, although the instrumentation is often dialled down to accompany the vocals, rather than the elements merging to create a sonic whole.

There are obvious reasons for this: Stack Overflow in Corpse Pile Interface is as much like a musical as it is a metal album. Without wishing to sound in any way mocking, one can almost picture Curse lofting a skull and affecting his most dramatic Hamlet-inspired gushings as he proclaims in the most thespy rendition of anguish, “Shit of that shit! The enshitenment!” on ‘Street Level Vertigo’. Yes, he knows his words and wordplay, and clearly revels in the way words reverberate and resonate and rub against one another to conjure layers of meaning and heightened drama.

‘Mechanically Separated Logic’ references the processes of the meat industry, applied to the psychology of late capitalism, and while the instrumentation is subtlety detailed and softly picked for the most part, only bursting into cathedrals of sound in places, again, the vocals are pure theatre, bold, exaggerated, and it’s hard to know quite how to take it, to deduce how serious this preposterously excessive style is. But even assuming there is a knowingness, a joyful revelling in the absurdity of all of this, it feels more like a work to respected and admired rather than enjoyed. No, that’s not entirely accurate: it’s enjoyable, even entertaining, particularly with its folk flourishes and revelling in the excremental, but it’s enjoyable as a performance, rather than as a set of songs which resonate on an emotional level.

AA

AA

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Codex Serafini / Amon Acid / Sunbreather – Santiago’s Bar, Leeds, 26th April 2026

Posted: 27 April 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Situated in a retail arcade in Leeds city centre, Santiago’s is a hip but alternative bar (in that it’s £6+ a pint of keg, and they play Nirvana and have band posters on the walls – although they also include rather less obvious bands like OFF! and Cerebral Ballzy) downstairs, and somewhat contrastingly, a poky dive with a capacity of maybe 80, accessed via a rickety staircase and with a stage that’s barely six inches high, upstairs. Said upstairs room affords an unusual view of the streets outside through a large arched window which occupies the entire wall beside the stage. Seeing people and traffic moving around on the street below while the bands perform seems a strange juxtaposition, and with the limited lighting inside the venue, the interior starts unusually bright and grows progressively darker as the night progresses.

Sunbreather’s name may suggest something a bit hippyish, and in some respects, it’s not unrepresentative. They play doom heavily influenced by what in the 70s was heavy metal: that is to say, big Sabbath- style riffs. They play them with a certain swing, too, which is refreshing, and it’s nicely done. They close their four-song set with a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’, stripped back and heavy. The coda is played with the classic bassline at half-pace, with all the weight, and the wild guitar solo replaced by thunderous chords until the very end. It’s an inspired interpretation that works well, and isn’t out of place with the rest of the set.

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Sunbreather

Amon Acid are all about the flares and hair and lace and shades, and if the name sounds like something of a giveaway, then you’d be close enough: their thing is epic stoner doom with the deep infusion of psychedelia. The vocals are low in the mix, bathed in galactic-scale reverb and delay for good measure. The two guitars melt into one another, and while they may not be masters of innovation, they clearly know what they’re doing – and thankfully, the sound engineer has a handle on it, too. Winding up with a mammoth space rock groove, which skims out for an eternity, brings the set to a searing finale. And the longer they play, the hotter it gets. By the end of their set, we’ve all liquefied, and I find myself deliberating whether I need another £6.70 pint of am ok with the prospect of dehydrating.

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Amon Acid

While I’m deliberating, they put the fans on around the room. Meanwhile, some pissed-up cokehead cunt in an orange t-shirt who seemingly thinks he’s at a rave is going off his nut and trying to get onstage while Codex Serafini are setting up, and five minutes before they’re due on I get a sinking feeling and am hoping he’ll be leaving very soon. Mercifully, I realise around a third of the way through the set that he’d fucked off, hopefully his exuberance overtaken by a melted brain.

Codex Serafini are indeed brain-melting, after all. They’re a band I’ve been waiting to see for some time, and given the enormity of their music, the intimate nature of the venue is something of a surprise on some respects. But jazz-infused doom with a punk edge is pretty niche, and an act with albums released on Riot Season are never going to be playing anywhere huge. But this is precisely why we need small venues, and labels like Riot Season. And for all that, they definitely deserve a wider audience: when novelty acts like Angine de Poitrine are racking up millions of views, it’s apparent that the public aren’t averse to stuff that’s different or weird – in fact, they’re drawn to it. Especially when there are outfits and masks involved, as the popularity of Slipknot, Ghost, and Sleep Token (who aren’t nearly as weird as their presentation would suggest) – which means that it mostly comes down to PR. The fact of the matter is that ‘viral’ is almost never ‘organic’. And so here we have Codex Serafini, in red robes and tasselled face-masks, wrapped in Saturnian lore, merging metal, jazz, and post-punk, and this is what the music world needs right now, if only people would realise.

The first half of their ten-song set consists of material from their most recent album, Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, released last November. ‘Cause and Effect’ is an early standout for its deft, vaguely disco-hued drumming and almost funk-tinged groove. Matt McCartney’s bass doubles as rhythm guitar, the incidental melodies and atmosphere brought by the sax. And all the while, the percussion is cataclysmic and the vocals nothing short of other-worldly.

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Codex Serafini

‘Cronus’, ‘Janus’, and ‘Fountains of Enceladus’ are performed back-to-back in the sequence they appeared on Serpents of Enceladus, and Landing as the penultimate song of the set, ‘I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust’ is the sole representation of previous album The Imprecation Of Anima (2023).

At around fifty minutes in duration, their set is intense and sonically immense, filling the space with cathedrals of sound. It’s the last night of the tour in support of Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, and the Leeds reception sees it end on a high. And on a personal level, they were more than worth the wait. Would see again. Many times.

The 113 – The Hedonist

Posted: 17 April 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The singles leading up to the release of The Hedonist, the second EP by The 113 have very much been cause for excitement and built a buzz about the band. Each of the four songs is tense, taut, edgy, quickfire vocals spitting lyrical depictions of the grim present in which we find ourselves with a splenetic urgency against a noisy backdrop where the combination of bass, drums, and guitar – in themselves, completely conventional – meld to forge a dense, unified aural assault.

As they put it, The Hedonist ‘revolves thematically around an anti-technology sentiment, raising questions about data, online worlds and how these can be weaponised against you.’ This – and various surveys and reports – is indicative of an increasingly anti-technology (and certainly an anti-AI) sentiment among younger generations. They have reason for concern, and it’s hard to decide what’s scarier, the prospect how personal data will be used, or how entire swathes of jobs will cease to exist in the imminent future. Anyone who blithely pisses about making caricatures and action figures in the name of fun is not only missing the point: they’ve already sold their soul and more. They’re part of the machine.

We’re living in every single dystopian fiction ever created all at once, right now. This isn’t hyperbole. And it feels as if we’re all trapped and helpless. It’s small wonder we’re experiencing a mental health crisis as we see an entire generation coming through paranoid and scared as we witness an existential threat in many ways worse than the cold war, inasmuch as it’s a war on all fronts.

The 113 recognise this, and The Hedonist is an articulation of this infinitely-faceted terror. Every single track is a standout, and in sustaining the high level of intensity across the whole EP, the potency of the material is amplified. Where The Hedonist succeeds is in the way it doesn’t depart from the blueprint of the debut, To Combat Regret, but instead builds on it.

It’s by no means music to chill out to: quite the opposite, in fact. It’ll likely raise your blood pressure and make you clench your jaw and fists. But if there’s a band that encapsulates the zeitgeist, it’s The 113.

AA

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The 113 – When I Leave

Posted: 31 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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EMI North / Launchpad+ – 30th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The 113 have done it again – only this time, more so. Like its predecessors, single ‘When I Leave’ is take from the forthcoming debut EP, The Hedonist, which is due to land on 17th April. And once again, it steps things up.

It follows the noisy path of debut, ‘Leach’, a vitriolic blast which powers in on a thick, thunderous overdriven bass, paired with an attack of heavy-hitting, cymbal-smashing percussion, slamming in with hard impact in the opening bars. Immediately, it’s the sound of a band that means business and arrives with a physical force. The vocals are straight in with a pumped-up spleen-venting tone of disaffection, and on this outing, the focus of their dissection and dissatisfaction with the conditions of contemporary living is lasered in on ‘the personal, exploring the gamified and repetitive nature of dating apps, where every interaction can seemingly begin to blur into the next’.

The accompanying notes expand on this, explaining how ‘the track captures that specific sense of cyclical monotony; scripted conversations, fleeting intimacy, and the almost inevitable feeling of disillusionment that can occur following the search for something real within systems designed with the purpose of endless scrolling: “Nice to meet you! Scratch the skin and we’re done, and hold the stench of a thousand pros playing for fun”.

Does anyone actually gain anything but grief and stress from dating apps? A few shit experiences, perhaps gathering a stalker or pest along the way, but really, how many find love – versus how many find nothing but the dregs of humanity?

It’s perhaps relevant to mention here that I met my (now late) wife online, in a music chatroom, at the turn of the millennium, before dating sites existed and before it was socially acceptable to meet people from online in real life. Her friends and parents were far from encouraging about her meeting me: back in 2000, the perception was that the Internet was full of weirdos, creeps, stalkers, and worse. Now… perhaps we’re more willing to take those gambles with the ever-expanding creep of isolation as a result of floating office hours, where people only see one another occasionally, the death of after-work drinks, and social media taking precedence over in-person interaction. How do you meet new people nowadays? Is this really what we’ve come to? It would seem the answer is yes….

And then, the guitar kicks in over that thick bass and pounding percussion, and it’s squalling and dissonant and then everything hits a laser focus to drive home a blistering chorus – their strongest yet – and POW! ‘When I Leave’ is two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of concentrated, distilled intensity.

AA

AA

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Credit: Naomi Whitehead

Polevaulter – Descending

Posted: 19 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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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.

AA

AA

Polevaulter

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