There’s a particular brand of madness that occurs when an artist gets bored of their own tricks. Jake Brooks didn’t experience some dark night of the soul; he just got sick of guitar and ran out of cassette tapes. Sometimes the most radical artistic shifts have the most mundane origins, and Factory Reset, Retail Drugs’ third full-length record in fifteen months, is what happens when rage gets funnelled through a laptop instead of a four-track: the sound of someone taking an industrial drill to a server room mid-breakdown.
The album imagines a near-future where you can erase your past self. “Which I guess you can kind of do on the internet, sort of,” Brooks notes with characteristic understatement. This dystopian premise hangs over the record’s fifteen tracks like digital smog, its glitched textures and buried vocals suggesting a timeline that’s completely fractured. For some reason, it has the same cursed quality as The Ring, but instead of a VHS tape degrading with each copy, it’s the brain-rot of endless scrolling – TikTok’s fifteen-second fragments shrinking attention spans down to the size of a dopamine hit.
Factory Reset opens and ends with sustained drums and deliberately warped and degraded synths that often echo the experimental sounds employed by Manchester’s Handle on their DIY opus In Threes, but pushed until they collapse into noise. Brooks claims he blacked out making it, which tracks because the album lurches from one idea to another in violent bursts, each track cramming weeks’ worth of concepts into brief, convulsive spasms. Brooks communicates only in primal murmurs, the occasional frustrated howl and mangled electronics. The result is feral, confrontational, occasionally repulsive but strangely compelling.
What’s most interesting is the disconnect between process and result. Brooks describes his writing as “leisurely” and “relaxing”, which is either profound artistic irony or evidence of concerning psychological compartmentalisation. He spent eight months tracking improvisations straight to Ableton while inhabiting the perspective of the green mountain man from John DeSousa’s cover art. His two rules were simple: write for the green guy, no guitar allowed. “I felt like the Green Mountain Man wouldn’t fuck with shoegaze,” he explains, as if this is a perfectly reasonable artistic framework.
There’s a temporal split in contemporary music right now: artists either push so far into the future that they arrive at post-digital decay, or they retreat into the folkloric past like Lankum. Brooks chooses the former, creating something that sits somewhere between the textures of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and the grit, feedback and glitch aesthetics of Fennesz’s Endless Summer, channelling the scorched, electropunk of UK DIY-ers Bathing Suits and Silverwingkiller but filtered through Squarepusher’s manic energy. ‘Rhineback’ sounds like Animal Collective via Charli XCX, hyperpop ambushed by experimental noise, driven by a militaristic throb straight from the Throbbing Gristle playbook. It’s all held together with digital duct tape, everything constantly on the verge of malfunction.
Factory Reset is divided into two movements, with a break after ‘He Hears Us (Reprise)’ – the only moment Brooks allows himself the forbidden guitar, violating his own rules because, well, fuck it. The album doesn’t progress so much as exist in perpetual controlled panic, a sonic spectacle haunted by the sound of someone who can’t process time the way we’re used to.
Brooks describes Retail Drugs as an outlet, something he’s perpetually recording for without much concern for where it’s headed. Factory Reset captures that restlessness – the sound of an artist moving too fast to look back, already thinking about whatever comes next.
