Hari Hardman’s The World Died A Long Time Ago arrives like a bruised time capsule flung from a collapsing timeline: rusted at the hinges, leaking bad dreams and paranoid poetry, humming with lo-fi signals from some derelict broadcast tower that never got the memo about the end. It’s music as séance, junkyard liturgy, and existential pratfall - all delivered with the charisma of a ghost who’s seen too much and decided to laugh anyway.

In just under 24 minutes, Hardman offers six tracks that don't just explore decay - they dance in it, lick it, wear it as a second skin. There's a dystopian playfulness here, like a kid kicking around skulls in a sandbox. Titles like “Highgate Boris Karloff” and “Lysergic Trapdoor” suggest a surrealist horror-comedy of manners, while the sound itself leans into twisted tape manipulations, mangled beats, and industrial detritus arranged like a sonic collage of urban collapse. Think post-punk’s forgotten cousin, raised by VHS ghosts and dropout circuit-benders.

There are recognizable elements - snippets of melody, haunted vocal treatments, rhythms that stumble like drunk prophets - but they're fleeting, glimpsed through murk and noise. At times, it recalls the haunted DIY ethos of early Cabaret Voltaire or the theatrical nihilism of Nurse With Wound on a particularly concise day. But Hardman isn’t imitating anyone. He’s muttering into the void in his own distinct dialect: post-collapse vernacular for the weird and the wounded.

“Garry Guerrilla” kicks things off like a half-remembered theme song from a cancelled spy show on a dead satellite. “Harbingers of Doom” is less prophetic than it is resigned - doom not as threat, but as old roommate. “The Last of Slough” manages to make the name of an English town feel like the punchline to a cosmic joke, delivered in reverb.

The production is gloriously wrong in all the right ways: crusty, hiss-soaked, and defiantly lo-fi, as though recorded onto wax cylinders using broken surveillance equipment. But that’s the aesthetic’s strength - Hardman isn’t polishing anything. He’s embalming it, wrapping it in hiss like linen, prepping it for a pyramid that was never finished.

There's also a strange tenderness lurking beneath the grit. You hear it most in “Satanic Antarctica”, a glacial closer that floats in a sea of slow decay, whispering to penguins and demons alike. It’s mournful but serene, like someone lighting candles at the end of the world - not to fight the darkness, but to make it feel a little less lonely.

And yes, the question hovers - will we ever really understand the unanswered question? Probably not. But Hardman doesn’t seem to mind. He’s built a soundtrack for the era after all questions stopped mattering, after the curtain fell but before the applause. The world, he suggests, didn’t end with a bang or a whimper. It ended a long time ago. We just didn’t notice.

And here he is, DJing the afterparty in the ruins. Bring your own bones.