There’s something refreshingly unpretentious about Flyover Noise: a title that already shrugs, smirks, and lights a cigarette under a buzzing highway lamp. Derision Cult don’t come bearing grand manifestos or shiny futurisms here; instead, they roll up with two covers, a sense of lineage, and the kind of affection that only comes from having your DNA scrambled by someone else’s songs years ago.

Derision Cult, long-time operators in the American underground with roots tangled in industrial rock, EBM grit, and post-punk abrasion, have always understood that influence isn’t a museum piece. It’s a living, dented thing. On this short EP they turn their attention to two Illinois acts that clearly left bruises worth revisiting, and they do so without irony, pastiche, or cosplay. This isn’t karaoke with distortion pedals - it’s translation.

“Rocket Science” (originally by The Goodyear Pimps) comes out sounding like a confession shouted into an empty Midwestern parking lot. The song’s wounded romanticism - equal parts bravado and self-loathing - fits Derision Cult like a thrift-store jacket already broken in. They lean into the vulnerability without sanding down the rough edges, letting the repeated mantras spiral into something obsessive, almost claustrophobic. It’s love as fixation, identity as something you trip over rather than build. Not pretty, but honest in that unflattering way mirrors tend to be.

“Better Than Me”, pulled from Sister Machine Gun’s canon, shifts the EP into darker industrial territory. The nihilism here is blunt, almost weaponized: self-erasure as freedom, desire as the only remaining law. Derision Cult amplify the track’s fatalistic swagger, making it feel less like rebellion and more like a tired truth muttered through clenched teeth. The groove burns steadily, not explosively - controlled combustion, the kind that keeps you warm while everything else goes cold.

What makes Flyover Noise work isn’t nostalgia, but proximity. These songs aren’t treated as relics from a “golden age” of industrial or alt rock; they’re dragged into the present and scuffed up accordingly. Derision Cult understand that the so-called flyover states have always produced music heavy with contradiction: aggression and vulnerability, arrogance and defeat, movement without escape. This EP hums with that tension.

It’s short, sure. It doesn’t pretend to reinvent anything. But Flyover Noise knows exactly what it is: a nod between bands across time, a reminder that influence isn’t about geography or prestige, but about which songs lodged themselves in your nervous system and never quite left. Two covers, zero filler, and a lot of feeling packed into under eight minutes. Sometimes that’s all you need - just enough noise to remember where you came from, and why you’re still here.