Eric Powell’s 16Volt has always felt like the musical equivalent of a post-apocalyptic muscle car - stripped-down, slightly dented, built for destruction, but still roaring proudly down the highways of distortion. After a seven-year pit stop in the wastelands of hiatus, "More or Less" feels like a defiant re-entry into the fold - not with bells and whistles, but with grit under the fingernails and smoke curling from the engine.

What you get here isn’t some genre-redefining reinvention. Thank God. "More or Less" doubles down on what Powell has always done best: weaponizing dissatisfaction, channelling frustration into jagged riffs, syncopated snarl-beats, and a bark that doesn’t ask for sympathy but somehow earns it. It’s industrial rock not for the future, but for the disenchanted present - the one where your voice becomes static ("White Noise"), your optimism gets repo’d ("Empty As Hell"), and your therapist tells you to maybe "add it all up" instead of writing songs about it.

The production is tight but not sterile - everything sounds like it was filtered through an oil-slicked chain-link fence. There’s a retro-futurist tension at play, as if "More or Less" was recorded in a 1997 cyberpunk club squatting in a 2025 server room. Songs like "Unfolding Time" and "On Memory Lane" flirt with introspection, but Powell keeps things brisk - there’s no time to cry in the club if the club’s on fire.

Lyrically, Powell is still the charming misanthrope - never whiny, never overly cryptic, just refreshingly cynical in an age of over-processed emotionalism. Even when he indulges in sentimentality, it’s barbed: a bouquet of broken synths and barbed wire, lovingly arranged. He’s not here to heal you. He’s here to hand you the right kind of hammer.

It’s worth noting how much "More or Less" is tethered to Powell’s past - not just in sonic continuity, but spiritually. It’s the sound of someone rifling through old photo albums, then setting them on fire for warmth. There’s catharsis here, but it’s the hard-won kind, earned through decades of industry limbo, major label betrayals, and soundtrack cameos in long-forgotten PlayStation games.

Is it revolutionary? No. But that’s the point. It’s resolute. It’s sharp enough to draw blood but smart enough not to kill you. It’s exactly what it needs to be: a reminder that even the battered machines can still run when the fuse is right.

In a world constantly promising "more", Powell offers "less" - and somehow that feels like a gift.