It’s a good time to be angry, horny, and queer. The electroclash revival has been pulsing for years and, with recent releases from scene originators Ladytron, Peaches, and Chicks on Speed, as well as brainrotted young artists like MGNA Crrrta and Tiffany Day, it’s now throbbing at full power. The stripped-down technopunk kept Lower East Side bars of ill repute gacked out in the months and years after 9/11, soundtracking a party at ground zero that didn’t just feel the terror of the moment but embraced the opportunity to build something new in its place. Despite its hedonistic reputation—or, rather, in tandem with its hedonistic reputation—electroclash was a way to fight oppression with the power of sounding super, super gay. Of course it’s making a comeback.
While Detroit’s ADULT. were part of the genre’s initial spurt in the ’00s, and even performed on the eponymous tour that emerged from New York’s Electroclash Festival (inaugurated in October 2001, naturally), their music has always had a harder edge than that of their peers. The minimal, vinegary sound they’ve developed over the last 30 years is closer in feel to the early EBM of DAF and Nitzer Ebb, while singer Nicola Kuperus’ sloganeering is too pointed to be sexy. For her and Adam Lee Miller—ADULT.’s sole other member and Kuperus’ spouse—this music is an embodied form of community-making and critique, a way of serving vicious jeremiads whose potency is too strong to be ignored no matter how hard you’re dancing. Peaches was right, you should fuck the pain away; ADULT.’s 10th album, Kissing Luck Goodbye, is here to incite revenge on the people who caused it in the first place.
Kissing Luck Goodbye feels like a soft reset for Kuperus and Miller. The duo greatly expanded their sample library, ripping random melodies from thrift-store records and manipulating their own field recordings. “No Song” uses a snatch of static for its snare and what sounds like a kettle drum being played in a cave for its kick; a squealing synth sprints circles around “No One Is Coming”’s beefy bass line like a haunted theremin.
Such attention to detail is crucial to the success of these songs. Unlike 2022’s densely packed Becoming Undone, Kissing Luck Goodbye feels lean and sinewy, in fighting shape. The songs sprint past with a minimalist economy that matches the intensity of Kuperus’ vocals. Her style is rich with character, and she shifts between deliveries quickly and with conviction. At times she sounds like B-52’s’ Cindy Wilson filling in for her bandmate Fred Schneider, using the sweetness of her natural voice to spike an off-beat exclamation into the music. “Suck out your eyes/Fuck your head,” she sings over synths that dart like agitated minnows in “Destroyers.” She delivers many of her lyrics with the insouciance of Johnny Rotten, like she’s mocking your desire for a straightforward melody. “Your entertainment has been/disrupted,” she sings in “Kissing Luck Goodbye,” sounding like Anthony Kiedis reciting lines from Barbara Kruger. Any one of these vocal strategies would easily overwhelm less thought-out programming, but Kuperus’ mildly campy sing-bark moves in tandem with the rough textures of the music she and Miller create together.
While these songs might appear to be somewhat straightforward EBM that wear their politics on their latex sleeve, there’s a level of ambiguity at work that moves Kissing Luck Goodbye past its own bromides and into deeper artistic territory. “Affordable decorating,” Kuperus chants in the opener of the same name. “Arranging and rearranging.” An innocuous enough line on its own, but keep listening to the record and it starts to feel like a kind of mission statement. Sure, it’s easier to simply rearrange the options we already have, and doing so might offer the illusion of change, but it doesn’t actually make a difference; it’s merely a novelty that makes everyday life more tolerable.
Irony and sincerity chase one another in such a tight pattern in “None of It’s Fun” that tracking them will make you dizzy. The thumping of the song is obviously fun, so Kuperus’ repetition that “none of this is fun” must be ironic, but her delivery makes you wonder whether she’s mocking self-serious artists or if she’s insisting on the seriousness of her own music. The answer is probably the former, but the album’s accumulation of lines like this is enough to throw you a bit, to let in a minor interpretive shift that changes the song’s whole meaning. The album peaks with “No One Is Coming,” named for a phrase (“No one is coming to your rescue”) the duo jotted down in early 2025, shortly after President Trump’s second inauguration. It can be read as a warning, the song’s screaming synths like air-ride sirens, but its builds and drops are so thrilling that being left alone starts to feel like a kind of liberation; when your world cannot be made to function properly, you can build one that actually works.
More than the album’s occasional campiness, its sleekness, or the fact that it works supremely well as club music, Kissing Luck Goodbye comes off as queer music because it celebrates the places where systems fail. Not just political systems, but artistic ones, too: the space between tonality and atonality, melody and noise, dance music and head music, party and critique. Three decades into their career, ADULT. continue to shape fascinating sculptures. Like an object wrapped in fiberglass, you want to run your hands over Kissing Luck Goodbye; do so and you’ll pick up its splinters.
