This London outfit’s 2013 debut LP delineated a stark, seductive vision of post-industrial punk/funk techno—offsetting brutally minimalist loop marathons with restless flurries of live percussion, squirming electronics and Nik Void’s vaporous vocals, to mesmeric, potently physical effect. It was also something of a monolith: a closed system of an album establishing and fulfilling its own specific aesthetic objectives, leaving seemingly little room for its ideas to be expanded or improved upon. Three years later, with the group reduced to a duo (Void and drummer/programmer Gabe Gurnsey), 25 25 bolsters that sense by offering eight slabs of essentially the same, only more so.
If anything, these cuts are even more stripped down, blunter and bleaker, offering less to hold on to—the first album was hardly a hookfest, but this one dials even further back on tonal intrigue, save the occasional acid-jacking ostinato—and that much more to hypnotize, nauseate and/or stultify, depending on context. If Factory Floor embodied a dynamic tension between paralysis and movement, claustrophobia and cathartic release, this outing functions similarly but tips the scales slightly toward the former categories. You’ve been warned.
—K. Ross Hoffman
