NONLETHAL WEAPONS - All The Universities Have Been Destroyed
Releases: August 23
This upcoming album from NONLETHAL WEAPONS draws heavily on industrial, noise, and techno to make for an intense listen. It's filled with some of the heaviest beats you can fathom at a range of different tempos and a scatter shot of accompanying noise spread throughout. We get some track's the feel like long and slow burns like the opener "Policing Utopia" and then songs that feel like a wall of fast-pounding crushed drums like the next track "Terrorist Sympathizer." And I'm sure that just from these two tracks you're already seeing a pattern. It's angry and forceful delivery tell you all you really need to know without any lyrics required.
The third track, which is also the currently available track on their Bandcamp page, takes a heavy rhythm that feels like it's calling back to the earlier days of Nine Inch Nails and pairs it up with a bunch of crazy noises. This is something that they lean heavy into on this album, taking these surprisingly danceable and punchy rhythms and setting them up against a backdrop of noisy and borderline atonal sounds. On the tracks that do this, it makes for a cool little trick - it makes these otherwise seemingly random noises wrap themselves around the drums, giving them this sense of forced syncopation and bending them to the will of the rhythm.
But it's not all this motif, on some of the tracks we get something that feels a lot closer to pure industrial techno pulsing like on "Projected Wilderness." This one leaves a heavy rhythm but gives a lot more room to to the bass synth, letting it really dominate the track heavy. It practically crushed my ears hear and I legitimately could not get enough of it. "War Crimes" was another one of the standout tracks for me, mainly because of that slower tempo and the wild manipulation of the percussion throughout. It started out tense and focused but there are these incredible parts where the delay and reverb on the hats gets super wild and changes the entire tone momentarily until returning to the original sound. The haunting little horn sound in there doesn't hurt either.
This is a pretty incredible album in a few ways. It manages to capture all the best tropes of industrial music without coming across as one note. It also keeps an eye towards experimentation, trying out some weird things that I hadn't associated with industrial music before. Finally, the overall production is quite well done as I could easily hear the minutia in most of the tracks even on the ones that felt the most hyper aggressive. Looking forward to having this one on cassette.
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