To fashion the aesthetic and soul of art-punk into an establishment worshipping, pro-Hillary Clinton ‘anthem’ has banished the genre into the deepest reaches of musical hell since; every set and record must now begin with an apology and a land acknowledgment. Like a trip to KFC after eating rotten chicken, even the sound of a punk timbre over a synth has given me nausea to this day. 2026 may be a year of rekindling, as La Sécurité joins Mandy, Indiana in going ornate and reckless with the genre.
Whereas the latter’s Urgh is a masterpiece of industrial sound design and ultra-propulsive fuckery, the former’s Bingo! dredges Guerilla Toss and Liars in a sewer for six months and calls it a day – a French sewer, at that. There’s a truly sublime sense of murkiness and disgust built into these tracks, like their instruments are made of worms and dank mud. The synths sparkle and the bass fizzles together in a great cloud that never forgets the drums are supposed to go somewhere, right? It’s then all the more entertaining that they can wring so much color out of the tracklist, each tune a grenade in a paintcan, but mostly brown and maroon MS paint.
If I could attach another image on top of that, it’s that the record must have been strapped with a Speed-esque detonation device that would’ve blown up the drumkit if it went below 200bpm; one can barely place a moment in which La Sécurité is not dropkicking you to the next one. Jokes on them, I quite enjoy being treated like that.
The final leg of the record dupes the listener more than once, where every track in its back half could have reasonably been a decent closer; I was left taking a cathartic final sip of my coffee as a track would end only to pick it back up as a seeming encore began three times in a row. Nothing wrong with priming your guests for the end of the party, a wry comment placed here and there about how early I have to work tomorrow before all-but kicking us out with “Ketchup”. We’re far past the days of using our artistic guns in the defense of capitalists and posers, so start the moshpit and end it before it gets too late. Because of Le Tigre, even punks have to have dayjobs now.
