My dear rivetheads, we are so fucking back.
I haven't spaffed me combats at a new industrial release with such giddy delight since Cubanate triumphantly returned from the dead with the Compound Eye Sessions nigh on a decade ago. The scorching new blinder from LA outfit INVA//ID is more than just a pleasing collection of sounds that tickle the correct industrial receptors. This is a defiant statement of intent. INVA//ID's previous unapologetic declarations of dancefloor-friendly electro-industrial militancy seem like mere warning shots in comparison to this stinking great munitions salvo.
Opening with a hip hop instrumental is a good way of instantly snaring the attention of a jaded rivet head who's heard all the manoeuvres before. Following that up with a track that switches from skittering breakbeats and splenetic ranting to the sort of full-pelt, knackers-out amphetapunk that hasn't graced an industrial album since Al Jourgensen's snarling "just like a car crash / just like a knife" heralded a decisive turning point in his band's story as much as the entire genre's...well my friends, this listener is now so utterly fucking on board we've bolted ourselves to the main deck in a cruciform position, eager to lap up whatever punishment INVA//ID see fit to mete out next.
The vocals are spewed out with all the uninhibited venom and disgust of Ogre describing a vivisection. The beats bounce, bash and break with hectic abandon. The guitars only appear where they're welcome, letting the synths and samples lace the whole affair with a menacing aura that could all too easily have been weighed down by excessive riffing but insteads billows out like the noxious black clouds of LA ablaze.
This is not an album entirely without prior reference points - Vancouver's often overlooked "third" legendary industrial act Numb being a fairly obvious one - but if all of these ideas were already out there, why didn't it occur to anyone to put them all together until now?
I am reminded of a Quietus piece that quite rightly gave ex-Nottingham Forest striker Paul "Honey" McGregor's goth'n'roll machine Ulterior credit for taking the recognisable sounds of band X and band Y and combining them to create substance Z; a new, hitherto undiscovered third sound that was uniquely Ulterior's.
When INVA//ID carve out serrated Nihil type riffs over a juddering Caustic Grip era beat they're not "doing" vintage KMFDM any more than they're "doing" Front Line Assembly. They're doing INVA//ID, plain and simple. One need not reinvent the wheel when the rusty spokes lying around the workshop can be repurposed for a far deadlier machination.
Over a decade on from Youth Code injecting some much needed vitriol into the sagging, prolapsed anal capillaries of our beloved and once-great genre with their startling debut album, INVA//ID have lined up all of the elements that made 90s aggro-industrial an equally credible threat both on the dance floor and in the mosh pit and, with a tactical precision strike from their unlubricated steel toe caps, deftly booted them clean into 2025.
It has taken a quarter century to get this thing of ours fully back on its feet and scrape the CombiTech, Me-TRIPE-olis-core and memedustrial off our Doc Martens, but you can't rush art any more than you can hurry a Murray.
Agony Index is a spectacular way to kick off 2025 - which, until a worthy challenger appears, will indisputably be INVA//ID's year. And hopefully one in which a hundred industrial flowers will bloom and replace 80s throwback synthgoth as the predominant sound of alternative Los Angeles.