Hell is real, Suicide often seemed to suggest, and it sounds like an anguished Elvis Presley gurgling for dear life, half-submerged in raucous, reverbed waters. For a good amount of his time on Earth, Alan Vega was drowning, too. Long before he was Suicide’s vocalist, he braved a bleak version of New York, sleeping on sidewalks and subsisting on one-dollar tuna sandwiches. He saw the potential of expression to pierce through his oft-barren reality—an itch that led him to the gallery, then the studio, then the No Wave circuit, then the nightmares of innocent concertgoers. (Come for the music, stay for the masochism: If you were lucky, the sharp object he used to slash his chest could have been your shattered wine glass!) As Alan Suicide, a short-lived moniker that preceded his musical career, he exhibited garish pile-ups of light bulbs and wires, like Rudolf Schwarzkogler pieces sans the corpse. The music he made as a solo act felt similar in effect: hazy hellscapes that combined styles like ’50s rockabilly and ’80s synth pop into concoctions that loomed in your head, often for reasons you couldn’t put a finger on.
In the years since, it’s become much easier to locate that finger—maybe because his stuff sounds so familiar in retrospect. There are lines to be drawn between Suicide and a number of successors, be it Crystal Castles or Death Grips, but those connections, particularly with Vega’s late-career work, are rooted more in approach than attitude. He was an ideas person, like most denizens of the information era, and decades before SoundCloud, or Kim Gordon avant-rap albums, or distortion-happy hip-hop underclassmen, he gave shape to the impulse to combine those ideas as loudly, and unforgivingly, as possible. That’s what makes Insurrection, his newest posthumous release, such a thrilling listen: Here’s this guy who grew up on Elvis and the Stooges slurring strange, ghastly aphorisms over headbusting drum loops and fighter-jet ASMR. Relentless as it can be, it also sounds like he was having a blast.
Since his death in 2016, Vega’s estate has bolstered a scattered catalog with more straightforward collections, their shared tumult less diluted by the happy-go-lucky attitude peppering his earliest efforts. Insurrection unearths 11 punishing, industrial lost recordings from the late ’90s, throwing his radiant vision and wretched reality into direct combat. More often than not, the reality is winning. There’s something both wrenching and invigorating about his gothic, moaned lamentations—“Oh, the angels bleed”; “Where is the light?”; “Oh, the words don’t exist”—on “Mercy,” a trench fight of a track with downbeats that blast like bombs. Vega was never so much a singer as a drawler; on songs like “Sewer” and “Murder One,” he’s rustling unnerving dictums, somewhere between streetside heckler and mythic doomsday prophet.
Should you need any further proof that doomsday is now, the music here—co-produced by Jared Artaud and his widow, Liz Lamere—is a mammoth, earth-shaking messenger. Listening to Insurrection feels like being trapped in an insurgent wasteland, where arson fires scorch corpse-ridden backstreets and police helicopters whir overhead, searchlights blazing. The gurgling Elvis of Suicide fame is present on “Crash,” except instead of doggy-paddling through a sea of reverb, he’s writhing beneath a heap of scrapyard metal—clipping drums, blaring static, single keys that detonate like a dystopian funeral dirge. The one time the background noise settles, and for just one moment you can clearly make out what he’s saying, it’s “Who should we kill?” “Fireballer Fever” rattles like a lawnmower that chewed up a thousand wah pedals and went rogue; Vega isn’t controlling the beast so much as running from it, wailing in anguished, breathless desperation. Again, it’s difficult to parse what he’s saying, but that’s beside the point. The point is that you’re in fucking Hell. Vega’s Inferno is loud, clamorous, and largely homogenous, but in a bludgeoning, performance-art way. It feels like the sort of immersive war exhibit you have to sign a waiver for.
Insurrection’s track titles invoke varying levels of death, torture, and superlative injustice: “Chains,” “Invasion,” “Cyanide Soul,” “Genocide.” Born into a brazen New York underworld, Vega spent his career taking evil, masticating it to its sonic rudiments, and spitting it back out, often directly in people’s faces. Half of experiencing his work is allowing yourself to suffer, to be under his control. This newest collection is an oppressive, nauseating roller-coaster ride. Once you get off, you’ll want to do it again.
