There are bands that sound like they’ve been assembled in a laboratory, and then there are bands that actually have. The Shell fall into the latter category, though their lab is less white coat and fluorescent light than smoke, wood, and voltage. With modular synthesizers built specifically for them by Expert Sleepers, they’ve taken the old power-trio format - drums, bass, guitar - and cracked it open like an actual shell, replacing the brittle rock clichés with flowing electronics, electronically augmented sax, and percussion that’s just as likely to be sourced from literal seashells as from a snare.

Recorded live in single takes, The Shell is less an album than a weather system. The opener, “Four Decisions and Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse”, creeps in with processed shells and fluttering reeds before exploding into a storm that feels equal parts free jazz exorcism and kosmische overture. “Tears Seven Times” finds the trio wrestling with a motorik beat in an awkward meter - 7/8 never sounded so inevitable - layering sorrow, propulsion, and menace into something that both recalls and refuses Krautrock at the same time. And then there’s the vast landscape of “These Five Lidded Bowls”, which grows from the sparsest modular pulses into a crescendo so massive you wonder if Edinburgh itself shook during the take.

The appeal here is not only the scope of the sound but the way it’s made: improvisation that doesn’t meander but builds structures in real time, as though Can’s spirit had been re-engineered in a Scottish workshop. Saxophonist Andrew Ostler can sound elegiac one moment and apocalyptic the next; Simon Kirby’s modular pulses move like tectonic plates; Leigh Chorlton’s drums turn polyrhythms into earthquakes. Together, they conjure something that is less about jazz, less about electronics, and more about the feeling of standing at the edge of an uncertain century, trying to dance while the ground beneath you shifts.

The name The Shell feels apt - protective husk, acoustic resonator, fragile container, and discarded remnant all at once. Their debut is music that can feel both defensive and explosive, minimal and maximal, tender and obliterating. And while the gatefold sleeve comes in red vinyl, the real color of this record is closer to volcanic ash.

It’s tempting to imagine The Shell as the soundtrack to some unwritten apocalypse movie - not the Hollywood one with muscle cars and explosions, but the quieter kind, where three musicians in Scotland summon a world ending and beginning again in the space of a single take.