Welcome to the working week, rockers! It’s the first full week of the new year after you just spent the last few weeks in a workless limbo where Wednesdays feel like Saturdays and time loses all meaning. Now we all return to the 9-5 and that can be jarring. To ease you into the pain of returning to work, I’ve brought you something special, a double dose of two awesome bands who just did a split together and who hail from a region I don’t believe we’ve ever really covered before on Today’s New Noise.
So meet Head Wound, an experimental, noisy, mathy punk band and their friends in experimental glitch electronic band Soft Exit. Both of them hail from the West Asian country of Kuwait. Head Wound and Soft Exit just put out an amazing split together, simply referred to as SPLIT, and it’s streaming on all platforms.
I can’t even explain to you how much I love this split. I absolutely love experimental and avant-garde music that’s still fun and a bit catchy, and this just ticks all those boxes for me. Opening on Head Wound’s side of the split, we come in with a very basic lo-fi electronic drumbeat, D.B.V.T.Y. quickly turns into a synth-heavy catchy punk number. In a truly radical dedication to mathiness, the song abruptly stops mid-sentence several times, cutting to a gap and then coming back with something in a very different style, alternating between poppy, catchy egg punk and wildly chaotic noise punk.
“Evil Kinevil” doesn’t have abrupt gaps in the song like the previous track did, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still just as mathy, managing to turn on a dime to a completely different rhythm seamlessly. Then “Lockheed Daddy” keeps that going with a hardcore beat that gives way to abrupt changes, but also features a really fun and unconventional use of a synthesizer. “Air Koryo (Allow Me to Speak)” starts out as just pure electronically driven synth punk with a catchy beat and an irreverent attitude before an abrupt introduction of glitch electronic elements comes in, as if in anticipation of the band on the other side of this split, before returning to the original catchy little tune like nothing ever happened. It’s a thoroughly fun trip through the outer reaches of what punk is capable of, fueled by musicians with a great sense of imagination.
Check out Head Wound’s half of the split below.
Soft Exit are a bit of a different style than Head Wound, but at the same time there are a lot of obvious similarities. The simplest way I can think of to explain it is that Soft Exit are to electronic music what Head Wound are to synth punk. Both are experimental and mathy as hell. Soft Exit are a little less catchy, though, but they’re still their own special brand of experimental fun.
Opening up Soft Exit’s side of the split is “Prepaid Visa,” a truly chaotic journey through discordant sounds, experimental rhythms, and utter noise. “Mariana Foodcourt Livestream” keeps that going with a truly out-there noise track that incorporates a lot of elements that test the limits of what is music and what is just literally noises. There’s a lot that revolves around the ticking of a clock here, and does that qualify as a musical instrument? Judges? Sort of?
“Ocean Song” does have some elements of underwater ambiance, as the title suggests, but perhaps calling this a “song” is a bit of a stretch. Rather, it’s more of an avant-garde sound experiment that really demonstrates the group’s talent for glitch elements. Finally “White Dodge Charger (Lujan)” starts out a little more minimally, with faint, echoing voices and more ambiance before being bombarded with a sound collage of glitchy noises. It’s absolutely bonkers noise, but there’s still this sense of creativity, of fun, of energy and vitality.
Check out this half of the split below.
Follow Head Wound on Instagram and Soft Exit on Instagram for future updates on these awesome bands.
Photo courtesy of Instagram
