Exit the Void

A synth, a kick, a screaming brutalist eruption, and Exit the Void annhilates a future like the gaping maw of time.

It's not a quick, painless annhilation, as you might expect - or, perhaps, as you might have been hoping for. By no means is it a slow burn, either. There are many concept albums that like to toy with their narrative food, to roast it golden-brown on a spit and indulge in its taste as a delicacy. There are many more that obsess with threading themselves across thin heartstrings, tugging gently but firmly on their more personal, soulful aspects. Exit the Void is none of these.

Broken Note is an alias that is no stranger to the experimental. Remaining resolutely in the underground, they've scraped the London rave sphere for over a decade, with a corrupted death rattle of distorted, strewn basses, and a particular affinity for frantic breaks. They'd garnered some attention with their debut, Terminal Static, but nevertheless remained in their own lane as the decade continued. It was a complex lane, one filled with sharp auditory twists and glitchy dogfights, but it was their own lane, and it was this lane in which Exit the Void ultimately emerged from.

The album is a rapid-fire annhilation, to be sure, but it's certainly not painless. It is, simultaneously, drawn-out, but, again, by no means is it a slow burn. Exit the Void is a corrosive assault, a howling cosmic galeforce that peels off your skin and sucks out your brain through your nose for a whole hour of runtime. There's no stopping that cascade of auditory overstimulation as it surges out in monstrous droves; there's no resisting it, either. There is nothing to do but stand completely motionless, face befuddled, as your nerve endings are systematically and brutally deconstructed and reconstructed over and over again. It's the sheer, unimaginable intensity of the record that ultimately does it. It's the neurotic sound design that desperately evades the sustains that give chase, or the panic-stricken percussion and the thumping, unrelenting rhythms that overrule them. It's the thickly laid basslines that wash over halftime beats, and the madly complex leads, packed with glitches and jolts, devoid of any and all solace found in melody. Relentlessly engineered, Exit the Void rips through halftime and neurofunk with vengeance through its full first section.

Then it pulls back, and suddenly the industrial nature of Exit the Void is scaled to a terrifying magnitude. Great big piston-snares shuffle and recoil between the sighs of smoke machines and the factory hum of a technocratic dystopia. In a sense, the unapologetic brutalism of the record is, in some way, a political statement. At the very least, it's a challenge to the soulless industrial shell it sees in humanity's future. It's not resentful, necessarily - Exit the Void is almost entirely emotionless through its runtime, perhaps offset by the sublime "Upwards Spiral" or the sweeping interlude "Augmented" - merely speculative. This is a future that has been vacuumed up and torn apart, much like the monochromatic (and particularly perturbing) cover art suggests. Whether that's a future to be worried about is entirely left to the listener. In the moment, however, Exit the Void invokes glimpses of its harsh world, concealed by the screaming facade it presents. When the ferocity of the bass music retreats, even for a short breakdown, the deepset residue of dread always remains.

And then it returns again. The final section of Exit the Void is perhaps its most experimental, its most avant-garde - for what was already a particularly avant-garde album. "Parabolic Hex" snowballs onto the soundstage in a flurry of percussion, and it is absolutely riveting - "Pressure Chamber" takes its turn next, a compacted measure of harsh noise and distortion focused into a single pressurized lead. "Suspect Device" and "MurderBoii" are yet to come. Their crushing kicks and tumultous, explosive nature foot the tracklist with impatience, with the former brutally dismantling previous drum n bass rippers into a distilled, single-minded techno steam train, before the latter opens up almost immediately into an extortionately loud finale. The way this record moves is truly impressive, and it's pushed to its limit in the final section - the industrial machinations continue to swirl menacingly whilst the focal basslines build, and build, and build, till they are contained no more and "End Game" grinds Exit the Void to a halt.

Subtlety is not lost on Broken Note. It is difficult to come by in a record as boisterous as their sophomore, but the intricacy is always there, in an off-kilter glitch or a particularly frenzied break or a meaningful breakdown. As the wormhole of a cover art slowly overwhelms the brutalist landscape underneath, Broken Note lay waste to their own soundscape in a concept album of epic proportions. Exit the Void is, ultimately, completely unpalatable and often a very difficult listen by design, but an overwhelmingly impressive one.