‘No quiero salir al exterior, Hace años quey a no veo el sol, Mis músculor ya no servirán, Mis amigos nunca más me verán’ / ‘I don’t want to go outside, I haven’t seen the sun in years, My muscles will be useless now, My friends will never see me again’ (Mis Amigos Nunca Más Me Verán)

Unless we’re careful, we can find ourselves living amid a maelstrom of never-ending notifications and ceaseless updates that serve to fracture attention and prime an endless doomscroll, aided by an app for every neurosis that technological intrusion sowed in the first place.  300 Noches Sin Dormir (300 Sleepless Nights) is a relentlessly hyperactive manifestation of this malaise.

This is the second album from synth punks Sistema De Entretenmiento (System Of Entertainment), who hail from Mollet del Vallès in Catalonia, and follows up their 2022 self-titled debut.  The band refer to their music as ‘Arcade Punk’, which certainly captures the essential spirit of their sound.  It is effervescently restless synth punk that is refracted through an abrasively lo-fi lens to conjure an utterly frenetic exuberance that stalks the line between nervously glitching agitation and unhinged hedonism.

The crisply precise bass and drum machine, together with the brittle shards of guitar, form the scaffolding of the sixteen tracks.  But it is the manically skittering synths and energetically layered vocals that put the flesh on those bones.  Intriguingly for an album drenched in such primary colours, including its anime artwork, it is fuelled by an exploration of the rather less wholesome, and often intentional, blurring of what is real and what is fake that increasingly defines our lives.

Indeed, the tracks when these darker impulses gain the upper hand – the ominous pulse Zona Desconocida (Unknown Zone), the languorous swing of Soy Un Rocker Y Perdedor (I’m Rocker And A Loser), and the futuristic melodies of Fantasma En la Maquina (Ghost In The Machine) – are perhaps the standout moments.