Six years of silence, and then Holy Fuck crawl out from whatever fog-drenched Toronto barn they’d been haunting and hand you something that feels less like an album and more like a transmission from a noisy dimension.
Event Beat opens its mouth and “Evie” falls out — a bass line so locked-in it feels like it was laid down by a robot, while Brian Borcherdt howls reverb-soaked syllables at no one and everyone. You don’t so much listen to it as get processed and possessed by it.
From there the album sprawls and mutates. “Elevate” burns slow like a fuse you can’t find the end of. “Czar” is pure mechanical funk, the sound of a factory floor becoming sentient and deciding it wants to dance. “Gold Flakes” drifts like smoke through a room that might not exist. “Aerosol” starts as a shuffle and ends as a small controlled explosion in your living room. There is not a single moment of comfort or control here, and that is entirely the point.
I saw them live at La Sala Rossa in Montréal, and I’m still not fully back. I walked out onto Saint-Laurent at midnight feeling like I’d been briefly disassembled and put back together slightly differently. Highly recommend.
