Despite being born from a scene that professed musical freedom, hardcore, perhaps more than any other genre, became constrained by it’s own set of rules and regulations. Bands soon found their niche in one of the many sub-genres and were happy to cruise along in their own lane. Thankfully, there are band’s such as Indifferent Engine who are willing to rip up the rule book and throw convention out the window, and that’s exactly what they do with their debut album Speculative Fiction. Featuring eleven death-defying, brain-scrambling tracks, this is an album that raises the bar extremely high for all who follow.
As anyone who has seen Indifferent Engine live will attest, the band are far from serene; with old TV screens and monitors littering the floor and stage, and with their static, ghostly light illuminating the venue, the whole vibe is one of a technocratic, totalitarian graveyard, and that’s exactly what the discombobulating into to opening track ‘The Waiter’ serves up. It’s strangely hypnotic, subliminally altering the listener’s physiology and drawing them into another world, and that means that when the song kicks in at the two-and-three-quarters mark, it kicks in with some force. Like a tidal wave crashing to the shore, it totally subsumes the listener and weighs heavy as if an ocean bearing down upon a shipwreck.
There’s a depth and a multidimensional nature that sets them apart from their peers. Songs such as ‘Crashing Into A Hillside In The Dead Of Night’ are constructed in such a way that they almost become three-dimensional; they are sonic structures sculpted from sound and take on strange, unorthodox forms. It means that ‘Pylon Cult’ stalks with sinister menace, like the proverbial Iron Man it shakes the ground with every beat and radiates unsettling vibrations from the speakers. It’s an approach to music that gives Indifferent Engines a lot of freedom and it means that no two songs inhabit the same sonic space; even with individual songs there’s a constant evolution occurring, wheels within wheels, a constant motion with nifty time changes and unusual signatures propelling the band forwards and ensuring they don’t stay in one place for long.
The band have managed to carry over the raw, visceral energy from their live show to disc, and that means Speculative Fiction positively drips with emotion. If you’ve stayed throughout the whole album, you might feel emotionally drained when you reach the album’s conclusion, but good art should always take a piece of you. An assured debut that finds the bar not only raised for others, but themselves.
- Speculative Fiction is released via Church Road Records on 30th May 2025.
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Track List:
- The Waiter
- Crashing Into A Hillside In The Dead Of Night
- Lifetime Achievement Award
- Pylon Cult
- Bitcrush
- Wormholes
- Modern
- Crescents
- Verdigris
- Primrose & Acetate
- The Captain
