A New Brutality? What a name. It’s probably just about the best – and most apt – title for a record we’ve heard since Perc’s last solo outing, last year’s blistering album Wicker & Steel.
Perc is set to return with A New Brutality, a four track EP released through his own Perc Trax label, on 29th June. For anyone who’s been following Ali Wells’ industrially-flecked techno over the past few years this should be very exciting news indeed. Wicker & Steel was one of our favourite albums of last year, its blend of very British topographies, dancefloor pressure and rough, mechanistic textures still on regular rotation in the Quietus office.
Appropriately given its title, A New Brutality finds Wells pushing his sound outward to new extremes. The title track is, hands down, the heaviest thing he’s put to tape to date, opening with an eardrum-shredding screech of feedback and descending into a firey, furious inferno far more akin to William Bennett’s recent Cut Hands project (or, indeed, the visceral intensity his work with Whitehouse) than your usual notions of techno.
B-side ‘Boy’ is less aggressive but equally unsettling, pockmarked with sudden wheezes like a drowning person desperately sucking at the water’s surface for air. Elsewhere, ‘Cash 4 Gold’ and ‘Before I Go’ are some of the most beautiful music we’ve heard from Perc, with the latter a lovely, piano driven slice of dark ambient. Needless to say, we’re very exciting about picking this up on wax when it reaches shops.
A New Brutality is released through Perc Trax on 29th June.
