Brutalismus 3000’s Harmony finds the Berlin hard-dance duo at their most disciplined, but it still boasts the blunt pleasure of good gabber. Beneath the blown-out trap drums, reverse bass, metal-guitar flare-ups, and Victoria Vassiliki Daldas’s serrated singing is a melancholy that lingers. These are besotted love songs for the end times, romantic in an ugly way, and these industrial-strength club brats make Crystal Castles’s work sound like comfort music.
On paper, Harmony has the trappings of a big-budget mess, with a Lil Wayne cover, speed-house jolts, indie-sleaze revival worship, and a legacy-rave cosign from Underworld packed into less than an hour. Somehow, almost none of it feels like stunt casting or a band wandering outside its depth, though Brutalismus 3000’s whole aesthetic can still strain a bit too hard for shock value. “Garland” rams sawing digital feedback, revving synths, thudding 808s, and a driving bass groove into a track that keeps escalating without losing its shape. Even the “A Milli” cover eventually hammers itself into a real banger once its BPM picks up.
The thing holding all these maximalist sonic elements together is the ever-resourceful Daldas, who can craft a hook out of a shriek, a chant, or a distorted phrase. Producer Boys Noize gives “I Bring My Gun to the Function” a sleek finish, but Daldas keeps it from getting too tidy. “No Friends in the Company” and “You Were Never Really Here but I Miss Ya” work related nerves, turning paranoia and neediness into chantable material.
While Harmony is largely successful at pushing back against accusations of selling out, its most starry gesture—“Morning Is for the Happy,” a brief spoken-word interlude with Anya Taylor-Joy reading a poem about a dark hangover experience—is also its least persuasive. “Friends at the Pigshed” works better, pairing Brutalismus 3000 with Underworld as two outsider dance acts fluent in lyrical nonsense and deep feeling. What’s most surprising is how bright and open the track sounds, at least next to the claustrophobic aural onslaught that surrounds it.
By the time Harmony reaches the punked-up charge of “Gore Louvre” and the two-part “Testo Skin,” its title no longer scans as a cheap joke about disorder. Throughout the album, Brutalismus 3000 find balance between force and feeling, and in the process they arrive at their own version of harmony: acrid, elegiac, a little ridiculous, and affecting.
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