The Agency… – We Fell to the Floor
Listen, there’s a perfectly good reason, besides catching up on your Alt77 playlists, to spend your days walking around with headphones in your ears and to wave off anyone who might want to draw your attention towards them.
The era of great conversationalists has come and gone. Nowadays, everyone just wants to stop you and lay out the speeches that they have worked out in their minds for you. Worse still, everyone wants to complain about one thing or another.
It’s then a special kind of talent to be entirely self-involved and filled with a nihilistic vision of the world, and yet make yourself interesting enough that people want to stop thinking about themselves for a moment. The Agency… possesses that kind of quality.
What the band also has is a knack for using real lo-fi recordings to make the music sound like it was recorded after dark in some cathedral when those holding the ceremony were unaware of bootleggers. “We Fell to the Floor” is a down-and-out, shadowy sound complete with lyrics about facing the possibility of some sort of extinction. It’s fascinating because of its sound and because of all the ideas it keeps to itself.
Merwulf – Snowflake
No surprises! That’s what we demand and our mission in creating our lives. But that’s not what we get from anything other than the entertainment that we’re fed. And, I suppose that there’s a bit of relief in watching a Hollywood movie and knowing exactly how it’ll end after having viewed the first few minutes. It seems to tell you that nothing has changed in the world.
Only that it has! The radio hits are all the same, of course. They just change the bit and the people who get to sing over it, but there’s nothing in there that could possibly distract you from your chores.
However, the world is changing quickly and never in your favour. Each news bulletin is a new attack on your psyche. Every elected politician is a new villain to add to the list. That’s what Merwulf are trying to soundtrack.
“Snowflake” is a track that experiments with war drums and the sound of bombs falling out of the sky. Merwulf take the classic post-punk format and hits it from every angle until it’s misshapen and impossible to recognise. This would be the definition of a pop song in 2026 if we were able to be honest with ourselves.
