‘I saw an angel last night, Dowsed in gasoline, Flowers grew from their skin, And withered in the fumes’ (Angel)

As the gilded few, facilitated by a deluded and self-serving political class, continue to rapaciously gut civic society, they point the finger of blame at those who are dispossessed and driven into ever more precarious insecurity by their relentless greed.  MSPAINT’s new 12-inch, No Separation, is a rousing, yet thoughtfully constructed, call to confront his age of estrangement.

Having formed in Hattiesburg in 2019, MSPAINT spent time honing their distinctive guitarless sound, before releasing their debut album, 2023’s Post-American.  And this latest EP, sees the band brimming with an even more assertive confidence.  The rhythmic, hip-hop tinged exhortations of the vocals remain stridently powerful, and the soaring choruses are even more infectious, while the rhythm section has been imbued with a refreshed industrial muscularity.

Now, of course, a significant onus rests on the synths, and they prove more than up to the challenge.  Indeed, in not seeking to directly replicate the guitars, they take things in some intriguingly unexpected directions.  From ominous stabs of metallic dub to hazily hallucinatory swells, by way of the swirling Middle Eastern accented melodies, the palette is a rich one.  It would be easy for such disparate elements to fall foul of a certain clunkiness, but such is MSPAINT’s command of their influences that they never feel anything less than entirely organic.

Lyrically, the darkly pulsating Drift (‘We were never free, Just cost effective, Paid in dirt, Bound to debt’) and Surveillance (‘Margins of profit will benefit evil, Structured around anything but the people’) challenge the warped economic consensus that is hollowing out our society.  Meanwhile, Wildfire (‘Are you not tired of waiting, for nothing to save you?) and the title track (‘Skyscrapers are pollution, Reflecting sky, Reflecting light, Directly into your eyes’) call out our own complicity.

However, their message is not without hope.  Throughout, it is underpinned with a fierce recognition of the power of community and collective organisation to act as a bulwark of resistance, and as a primer for social change.  This culminates in the redemptive closer Angel (‘I feel like the problem, I feel in the way, But I’m staying present, This is just today’) that recognises that even the most entrenched system only seems eternal up until the very moment that it is not.