‘When they tell us, To play the game, That it all stays the same, Oh, it’s all an act, When we’re told not to relate, That it’s easier to hate, Oh, in a mechanical world’ (Kinetic World)

Alluringly deadpan vocals.  Contagiously crystalline shards of guitar.  Throbbing synths and bass lines.  Crisply sharp percussion.  It is a glacially fluid soundtrack.  Coldly hypnotic, yet also imbued with a strangely comforting warmth, it works its way into your very bones.  It provokes the need to move – not flamboyantly, but with an irresistible precision, nonetheless.

This can only mean the thoroughly welcome return of Memphis’ Optic Sink following their excellent 2023 album, Glass Blocks.  The band continue to meld a sombre post-punk melodicism with looping dance beats to subtly intoxicating effect.  The tautly constructed arrangements belie the rich detailing, a quality shared by the austere vocals as they seamlessly shift intonation as moods almost imperceptibly mutate.

It creates an atmosphere of beguiling uncertainty.  The sense of reality slowly revealing itself manifests itself as the album segues from the limber disquiet of Construction and the sinister unfurling of Don’t Look Down to the pulsing, hopeful urgency of Kinetic World and the languid euphoria of Luxury Of Honesty.  Amid the distorted reflections and fragments of memory, nothing is quite what it seems.  A monochrome, blandly repetitive world seeks to disguise the potential for change and embed that most powerful of lies – what is now, is forever.