by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
After five increasingly fantastic albums, Melbourne’s EXEK have undoubtably staked their claim as one of this generation’s most forward thinking post-punk bands. Their music is built on hypnotizing structures and a gentle surrealist plodding, heavy on warped and wavering synths, with elements of psych, krautrock, dub, and synthetic jazz. It’s a style they’ve expanded and collapsed with layers upon layers of subtle dissonance and patchwork perfection. There’s something instantly recognizable to the way the sextet, led by Albert Wolski, form their songs. They’re almost dreamy, but the chord structures and voicing seem to be spring loaded with tension, despite the drums deep in habitual groove, and the lyrics opt to paint in shades of societal dread (though you’d hardly know it from the soft melodic sensibilities). Set to release their latest album, The Map and The Territory on October 6th via Foreign Records, the band’s lush synth explorations continue to be dazzlingly muted but fully immersive.
“Welcome To My Alibi,” the record’s lead single, is both brilliantly drifting and rhythmically immediate, pairing Chris Stephenson’s radiantly in the pocket drum beats (breaks and all) with the laser-focused omnipresent synths. There’s a sense of mind expanding impermanence, awash in a world of hallucinations, floating like a celestial cloud, ready to transport us from one existence to the next. With collapse at the core, both in lyrical terms and amid a composition that counter-balances its own mesmerizing structure, EXEK manipulate their sound into something impossibly smooth, yet indirectly challenging, as hooks are seemingly cut and pasted into the alien glow of their progressions.
The video, directed by the great visual artist Siobhan McCarthy (whose recent EXEK poster is the one of the best we’ve ever seen), takes McCarthy’s stunning aesthetic of geometrical patterns and unearthly amphibious types, and transports them to an environment where the persistent goop threatens to swallow it all.