Low End Activist: Airdrop (digital, Peak Oil, April 2024)

I have a feeling that ‘deconstructed’ is one of my more overused words in this blog. But I’m afraid it has to get another outing today. I guess you could describe this as dub rave. There are lots of fragments of good old hardcore in here, but they’re all chopped up and swathed in reverb. On paper, you might think that having something sound like it’s about to kick off and then stop and disappear in an echoey haze would be frustrating. But it turns out it’s great! At least, when pulled off as well as this. It’s catchy and moreish and nostalgic and novel all sorts of good things. It even gets quite banging towards the end of the album. (I have to say, listening to the awesome Hinksey Hardcore, that he clearly has different associations with the Oxford suburb-slash-outlying-villages than I do.) This is just a deeply satisfying and crushable set of tunes.

I bought this from the artist’s Bandcamp page.