The Horror

Since releasing their synth-punk debut, 2010's The Grid, Brooklyn thugs Pop. 1280 have been dogged by ill-fitting genre tags. Their scuzzy urban roots and disregard for listeners' expectations suggest No Wave, but the songs on The Horror have too much forward motion and too little pretension to truly fit under that umbrella (primitive chant-along "Bodies in the Dunes" might even make the charts in some kind of post-apocalyptic society). The ‘'cyberpunk" label seems to be thrust at Pop. 1280 most often, but there's something almost anti-technology about the way their drill-press guitars, tribal drum clatter and blinding synth strobes bleed together into a singular cacophony. Still, frontman Chris Bug's lyrics certainly have a literary bent, each song seemingly a brutal sci-fi-noir vignette from an alternate universe that's just a bit more violent and morally decayed than ours. (After all, the band is named after one of Jim Thompson's bizarre and ultraviolent pulp thrillers.) The band's musical DNA (a particularly nasty hybrid of Suicide, The Birthday Party, the most grating post-punk and Steve Albini's least accessible projects) and Bug's sadistically detailed accounts of public execution fantasies and institutionalized torture ensure that The Horror will appeal to those who chuckled through A Clockwork Orange, and offend just about everybody else. But if the best science fiction usually seems to offer a skewed yet penetrating vision of the present, why can't the same be said for the unholy strain of mutant noise-punk Pop. 1280 have created?