On their previous album, Post Plague, Toronto’s Odonis Odonis warned us of the grave threats that technological dependency poses to the human condition. Now, a year later, they provide a despairing update: The robots have won. Where they were once a surf-damaged noise-punk trio, with No Pop, Odonis Odonis complete their incremental transformation into a bionic replicant version of their former selves. Their souls are trapped in the machine, screaming to get out. The last vestiges of their humanity have been choked out by wires, their internal CPUs threatening to violently short-circuit without warning.
Post Plague saw the group embracing the mechanized grind and aggression of EBM without sacrificing their primordial, paint-peeling dissonance. The album was so spot-on in its 1980s Mute Records evocations that they could drop a howl-for-howl cover of Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant” in their setlists last year without missing a beat. But while No Pop shares its predecessor’s compact, 10-track structure, the new album feels less like a series of discrete strobe-lit shocks than a single, amorphous, ultraviolet-lit piece. This is industrial punk shot through the smelting plant, mercurial machine music that solidifies and decomposes at regular intervals. And even though it eases up on Post Plague’s anvil-crushing pummel, it’s a more viscerally tense listen. The first lyric we hear on the record is “We have to talk”—a phrase that’s never followed by good news. It’s especially worrisome coming from singer Dean Tzenos, who sings with the unnerving numbness of a movie villain savoring the taste of his own blood after getting hit in the face. The steam-pipe synths and stalking beat that accompany those words on “Check My Profile” only amplify the sense of doom; once the queasy, contorted throb of “Nasty Boy” gets overwhelmed by piercing synth oscillations, Odonis Odonis effectively resemble a biohazard lab entering meltdown mode.
As they’ve moved beyond the lockstep thrash of some industrial music, Odonis Odonis have become ever more adept at doing more with less. “One” creates a suffocating sense of dread using just a circular bass-frequency pattern and synth squiggles that feel like spiders crawling up your neck. “By the Second,” meanwhile, is psychedelia stripped of its splendor, its chiming keyboard melody engulfed by icy textures like sunlight swallowed up by black clouds. Tzenos ominously repeats the words “Every second counts,” followed by a pained exhalation of “Ahhhhhs” that sound like a lost soul trying to remember what bliss feels like. Both tracks are best appreciated in the context of the album’s sequence, where they counter-balance the pulse-pounding peaks found elsewhere, like the Liars-on-Wax Trax thrust of “Eraser” (not a Nine Inch Nails cover) or “Vision,” a nerve-wracking jolt of diseased techno that retrofits Suicide for the supper-club.
It’s fortuitous that No Pop arrived the same month as Blade Runner: 2049—like the world of Ridley Scott’s epic sequel, this album is an immersive, disorienting display of technological precision and toxic atmosphere. You could say its mood is apocalyptic, but the images it conjures are less scorched-earth ruin, more classic claustrophobia. Congratulations: You avoided getting wiped out in World War III. Now you get to spend the rest of your life trapped in a subterranean shelter with flickering fluorescent lights that will slowly drive you crazy.
