There’s something charmingly Mancunian about "Scream If You Wanna Go Faster" - an album that feels like it was recorded at 2 a.m. under a flickering streetlight, half-inspired by industrial ghosts, half by the smell of chip oil and rain. Scissorgun, the trio of Dave Clarkson, Alan Hempsall, and Adrian Ball, have been working this strange alchemy for nearly a decade: urban electronica with a conscience, texture-rich improvisation disguised as design, and humour hiding behind a wall of treated guitars and malfunctioning rhythms.

Improvisation remains their secret weapon. Clarkson and Hempsall, veterans of Triclops and Crispy Ambulance respectively, still treat composition as an accident that happens to people with instruments in their hands. Their sessions sound like eavesdropping on circuitry learning to dream - loops misfire, tones warp, and a synth suddenly mutters something that might be profound. “We play it first, then invent the reason later”, they’ve said elsewhere - which might be the most honest artistic manifesto Manchester’s produced since Factory’s heyday.

The album opens with "Seven Bells", which pulses like an emergency signal that forgot what it was warning us about, then moves through "Face Deflector" and "Fresh Hell", whose titles alone promise the black humour of post-Brexit Britain, a landscape where absurdity has become routine. "Fever Dream" slides into slower territory, a half-melted club memory dissolving under sodium lights, while "Gone Rogue" plays with dub shadows and broken tape motifs - like The Pop Group gone modular.

Scissorgun’s peculiar gift lies in finding melody in malfunction. "Late Nite Bento" sounds like a lost broadcast from a Tokyo back alley filtered through Northern drizzle, and "Bad As Bingo" is as ridiculous as it is glorious - a stomp for malfunctioning drum machines. By the time "Cubanos Nocturne" closes the record, we’re somewhere between a sound installation and a fever hallucination, all reverb, tape hiss, and strangely comforting decay.

There’s a political undertone here - soft, implied, and unpreachy, like the hum of discontent beneath a pub conversation. The band claim the title is “a soft attempt at social comment”, but it’s more than that: this is the sound of a culture accelerating toward absurdity, laughing and wincing in the same breath.

What keeps it from collapsing under its own concept is Scissorgun’s self-awareness - a knowing wink in the circuitry, a grin behind the noise. It’s urban music with the heart of improvisational jazz and the bones of post-industrial punk. In short: "Scream If You Wanna Go Faster" is what happens when machines start writing social satire and realise they, too, need a pint.