Some songs are written once. Others stubbornly refuse to accept their first incarnation, quietly waiting for someone to discover the version they always wanted to become. "Lost In Your Eyes" belongs to the latter category. Emerging from the DNA of Ron Deacon's earlier composition "Killersong" (released in 2021), this collaboration with Interflug and Atlanta vocalist Zoree is neither a conventional remix nor a straightforward remake. It is something more interesting: an act of musical archaeology that uncovers possibilities hidden beneath the original surface.

That process alone deserves attention. In electronic music, "reworking" often means adding a stronger kick drum, extending the intro for DJs and calling it a day. Here, however, Ron Deacon, Daniel Schikowsky and Zoree approached the material almost like architects examining the foundations of an old building before constructing an entirely new house. The original stems were dismantled, rearranged and reimagined until the project acquired its own independent identity.

The fact that the collaboration developed without Ron Deacon and Zoree ever meeting in person somehow feels appropriate. Contemporary music has become full of long-distance conversations conducted through files, ideas and trust rather than shared studio sessions. Sometimes this distance creates something strangely intimate. Voices travel more easily than people.

For listeners unfamiliar with Ron Deacon, the Leipzig producer has spent more than two decades quietly shaping the city's underground electronic landscape through his work as DJ, producer and founder of RDF Music. Never particularly interested in chasing fashionable trends, he has consistently cultivated a sound rooted in disco, jazz and soul while allowing contemporary electronic production to expand those influences rather than overwrite them. There is a warmth to his productions that often distinguishes them from the colder precision associated with much European club music.

Interflug, the collaborative project of Daniel Schikowsky and Zoree, naturally complements that sensibility. Rather than imposing a radically different aesthetic, the duo identifies the emotional centre of Deacon's composition and gently shifts its perspective. Their contribution feels evolutionary rather than disruptive.

The decisive element, however, is undoubtedly Zoree's voice.

Possessing a background that ranges from choir singing to indie bands, her vocal delivery avoids both exaggerated theatricality and detached coolness. There is clarity in her phrasing, but also vulnerability. She never overwhelms the arrangement; instead, she seems to float just above it, allowing emotion to emerge through subtle inflections rather than dramatic gestures. One understands why her voice became the catalyst for the entire reconstruction.

The original version immediately establishes an elegant balance between dancefloor momentum and reflective melancholy. It moves with confidence, yet never feels impatient. The groove is understated, basslines remain supple, and shimmering synth textures provide just enough atmosphere without crowding the song. It recalls the best moments of sophisticated indie dance, where rhythm serves feeling rather than spectacle.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of "Lost In Your Eyes" lies precisely in this restraint. Many contemporary electronic pop productions seem terrified of empty space, filling every available second with decorative details until nothing has room to breathe. Here, each element knows its purpose. Silence, or at least relative silence, becomes another instrument.

The R.D. Disco Version naturally shifts the emphasis toward movement. Additional rhythmic accents and brighter harmonic colours transform the track into something more openly celebratory without sacrificing its emotional core. It understands an important lesson inherited from classic disco: dancing and longing have always made surprisingly compatible partners. Human beings have spent decades processing heartbreak under mirror balls. Evolution is peculiar that way.

The biggest surprise arrives with the R.D. Bossa Version. Rather than feeling like an obligatory stylistic experiment included merely to justify a three-track release, it reveals an entirely different emotional reading of the composition. The relaxed rhythmic framework softens the song's edges, allowing Zoree's voice to inhabit a more intimate environment. Suddenly, what previously felt like nocturnal club introspection begins resembling a conversation on a quiet balcony just before sunrise.

This versatility suggests strong songwriting beneath the production itself. A melody capable of surviving such different arrangements usually possesses genuine structural integrity. Strip away the electronic textures, alter the rhythmic language, and the composition still communicates.

Production throughout remains polished without becoming sterile. Every element occupies its own space, yet the mix retains enough organic warmth to avoid the clinical perfection that often plagues contemporary electronic releases. Benjamin Röder's artwork continues Compost Disco's elegant visual identity, complementing the music's understated sophistication rather than competing with it.

There is something quietly refreshing about a release that does not attempt to reinvent electronic music, announce the future of dance culture or revolutionise pop songwriting before breakfast. "Lost In Your Eyes" simply concentrates on becoming the best possible version of itself.

Sometimes that is more than enough.

At barely eleven minutes across its three incarnations, the EP demonstrates how different arrangements can illuminate different emotional dimensions of the same musical idea. Rather than presenting alternatives, these versions function almost like parallel universes, each revealing another facet of the song's personality.

In an era increasingly obsessed with constant novelty, "Lost In Your Eyes" gently argues for a different philosophy. Not every creative act requires starting from scratch. Occasionally, the most rewarding discoveries come from looking again, listening more carefully, and allowing an unfinished idea the time it needs to reveal what it was quietly becoming all along.

There are artists who write songs. Others build atmospheres. And then there is Pepijn Caudron, better known as Kreng, who seems determined to construct places that no sensible architect would ever approve. Places where forgotten memories linger in abandoned corridors, where silence weighs more than sound, and where every open door politely suggests that perhaps you should have remained outside.

After more than a decade without a proper solo album, "Wormhole" marks Kreng's long-awaited return to Miasmah, the Norwegian label that helped establish his singular aesthetic with works such as "L'Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu", "Grimoire", and the devastating "The Summoner". During his apparent absence, Caudron hardly disappeared. His extensive work composing for theatre, dance and cinema, particularly through his long association with the Belgian company Abattoir Fermé, has only deepened his instinct for narrative pacing and psychological tension. That experience quietly permeates every minute of "Wormhole". This is not simply music to accompany imaginary films; it feels like the film itself has dissolved, leaving only its emotional residue.

The album poses a deceptively simple question: what might a journey through a wormhole sound like? Science fiction usually answers with overwhelming spectacle. Kreng chooses something infinitely stranger. Rather than depicting interstellar travel through explosive crescendos or synthetic bombast, he imagines it as a gradual dismantling of certainty. Space here is not infinite; it is intimate. Darkness is not empty; it listens back.

"You Are Here" opens almost ironically. The title suggests orientation, but the music immediately removes any possibility of stable coordinates. Sparse textures, distant drones and microscopic details emerge from silence with remarkable patience. It is less an introduction than a slow adjustment of eyesight after entering an unfamiliar room.

From there, "Nachtzweet" ("night sweat") introduces one of Kreng's enduring gifts: the ability to make beauty feel slightly unsafe. Strings drift through fragile harmonic territory while low frequencies quietly destabilise the ground beneath them. His music has always occupied the fascinating intersection between chamber composition, dark ambient, cinematic scoring and musique concrète, but categorising it has become increasingly futile. Genre functions here merely as raw material.

Throughout the album, familiar sounds continually appear in unfamiliar contexts. A fragment of jazz piano briefly surfaces before dissolving into spectral resonance. Percussive gestures resemble footsteps that never quite reach their destination. Ghostly vocal traces hover at the edge of perception, never fully revealing themselves. Kreng understands one of horror's oldest principles: what remains partially hidden often becomes far more unsettling than anything explicitly shown.

Yet reducing "Wormhole" to an exercise in darkness would miss its quiet emotional complexity.

"Marilyn's Milk" offers one of the album's most intriguing moments, balancing nostalgic elegance against subtle decay. There are echoes of forgotten cabarets, old cinemas and faded photographs, but nothing is presented sentimentally. Memory itself becomes unreliable, as though someone had gently folded the past into impossible shapes.

The central sequence of "To Yield", "Entropy" and "Vacuum" gradually strips away conventional musical expectations. Rhythm loosens, harmony becomes increasingly suspended, while sound itself appears to acquire physical density. Erik K. Skodvin's production deserves enormous credit here. Every layer occupies precisely measured spatial relationships, allowing tiny acoustic events to resonate with startling clarity. Silence becomes an active compositional force rather than the absence of activity.

By the time "Donker" arrives, the journey has entered its psychological core. At over six minutes, it unfolds with extraordinary restraint, resisting any temptation toward dramatic payoff. Instead, Kreng embraces ambiguity. The piece feels suspended between ritual and dream, somewhere beyond narrative yet saturated with emotional implication.

"Altar" continues this ceremonial atmosphere before the closing "Gymnopedie" gently redirects the listener toward fragile light. The title inevitably recalls Erik Satie, although Kreng's piece is less quotation than distant echo. It functions almost like emerging from deep water, discovering that the world has remained unchanged while one's perception of it has quietly shifted.

One of the album's greatest achievements lies in its treatment of tension. Contemporary cinematic music often mistakes volume for intensity. Kreng understands the opposite. The quietest passages frequently generate the strongest unease because they invite the listener's imagination to complete the picture. His compositions leave carefully measured spaces into which memory, anxiety and curiosity naturally drift.

There is also an understated humour hidden beneath the album's solemn surface. Not overt jokes, certainly, but a delicious awareness of the absurdity lurking inside gothic aesthetics. Kreng has always balanced sincerity with theatricality, perhaps a consequence of his long involvement with stage productions. His worlds remain emotionally convincing precisely because they never become self-important. Even cosmic dread occasionally benefits from impeccable timing.

The artwork by Erik K. Skodvin perfectly complements this philosophy, avoiding explicit illustration in favour of suggestive abstraction. Like the music itself, it invites projection rather than explanation.

In many ways, "Wormhole" feels like a meditation on absence. Not simply physical absence, but the disappearance of certainty, of familiar landmarks, of stable narratives. Yet beneath its shadows lies something unexpectedly humane. The album repeatedly suggests that disorientation is not necessarily a failure of understanding. Sometimes losing one's bearings becomes the only way to discover a different map.

After such a long silence, it would have been easy for Kreng to deliver a triumphant return filled with familiar signatures and nostalgic reassurance. Instead, he offers something far more rewarding: an album that continues asking questions long after it has ended.
Some records invite repeated listening because they are pleasurable. "Wormhole" demands it because each return subtly alters the architecture inside. Like every convincing labyrinth, it never quite has the same shape twice.

Cover albums often arrive with the uneasy smell of obligation. A contractual pause between original releases. A respectful exercise in admiration. Or worse, a parade of faithful reproductions that answer a question nobody was asking. Thankfully, "Kover Kover" belongs to none of those categories. WEB WEB's first all-covers record isn't interested in paying tribute so much as testing a hypothesis: what happens when songs from radically different musical universes are stripped to their essential DNA and invited to inhabit somebody else's imagination?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that great songs are remarkably adaptable, provided the musicians approaching them possess enough confidence to stop treating them as sacred relics.

During the last decade, WEB WEB have quietly become one of Germany's most adventurous contemporary jazz collectives. Led by the endlessly versatile Roberto Di Gioia, alongside saxophonist and flautist Tony Lakatos, bassist Christian von Kaphengst, and drummer Peter Gall, the quartet has cultivated a rare chemistry built less on virtuoso display than on mutual curiosity. Their music has always resisted tidy categorisation, drawing equally from spiritual jazz, krautrock, fusion, ambient electronics, psychedelic improvisation and cinematic sound design without ever sounding like a patchwork of influences.

Perhaps that explains why a cover album feels less like a detour than an inevitable next step.

Rather than asking, "How do we play Nirvana?" WEB WEB ask a much stranger question: "What if Nirvana had unknowingly written music for WEB WEB all along?" It is a subtle but crucial distinction. The originals become starting points rather than destinations.

This philosophy immediately reveals itself with Klaus Doldinger's "Song Of Dying". The choice is fitting, given Roberto Di Gioia's long association with Passport, but there is no attempt to recreate the original atmosphere. Instead, the melody is gently absorbed into WEB WEB's own fluid ecosystem, where harmonic openness replaces stylistic fidelity.

The selection itself deserves admiration. Jazz musicians covering jazz standards rarely surprise anyone anymore. Here, however, Grace Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Talking Heads, Empire Of The Sun, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Joe Jackson, Grandbrothers, Eurythmics, The Dave Pike Set, and Passport somehow coexist without the album ever resembling a novelty playlist assembled by an algorithm suffering an existential crisis.

That coherence stems largely from the quartet's democratic working method. According to the accompanying notes, instruments frequently change hands during recording sessions. Roberto Di Gioia abandons the piano for bass, Christian von Kaphengst moves toward keyboards, Peter Gall occasionally leaves the drum stool, roles dissolve, habits disappear. One imagines rehearsals less as carefully managed sessions than as four exceptionally gifted musicians wandering into one another's creative territory with cheerful disregard for convention.

It shows.

"Slave To The Rhythm" loses none of Grace Jones' hypnotic authority, yet exchanges polished art-pop grandeur for something warmer and more organic. Hendrix's "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp" becomes less psychedelic spectacle than intimate meditation, while the minimalist architecture of Grandbrothers' "Bloodflow" quietly expands into something almost weightless.

Perhaps the boldest decision is "Come As You Are". Covering Nirvana remains hazardous territory because cultural memory tends to overwhelm musical possibility. WEB WEB wisely refuse to wrestle with Cobain's shadow. Instead, they uncover the composition beneath the mythology. The familiar melody suddenly reveals unexpected harmonic elasticity, almost as though it had been patiently waiting for this alternative life.

A delightful miniature version of Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out" lasts barely ninety seconds, yet contains enough tenderness to justify its existence entirely. According to the band's own account, the arrangement emerged almost accidentally when Christian von Kaphengst began exploring its chord progression on Fender Rhodes, prompting Di Gioia to swap instruments. That spontaneous reversal of roles captures the album's entire spirit: curiosity first, ego somewhere far behind.

Elsewhere, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" sheds its mechanical pulse without sacrificing its hypnotic quality, while Black Sabbath's beautifully understated "Planet Caravan" almost feels predestined for WEB WEB's spacious, contemplative aesthetic. Even Talking Heads' "Once In A Lifetime", a song so closely identified with David Byrne's singular nervous energy, finds fresh life by abandoning irony in favour of floating rhythmic elegance.

Throughout the record, Tony Lakatos proves invaluable. Having appeared on hundreds of jazz recordings and spent decades refining one of Europe's most expressive saxophone voices, he consistently chooses lyricism over display. Whether on tenor or flute, his contributions rarely dominate the arrangements; instead, they function as quiet acts of conversation, allowing melodies to unfold rather than announcing them.
Peter Gall, meanwhile, continues demonstrating why he has become one of Germany's most respected contemporary drummers. His playing constantly suggests motion without insisting upon it. Rhythms breathe, shift and stretch, refusing rigid definitions while never losing momentum.

The album closes with "Free", the only original composition, and perhaps the most revealing piece of all. Rather than serving as an encore, it quietly demonstrates how naturally these reinterpretations have dissolved into WEB WEB's own musical identity. After travelling through thirteen borrowed songs, one arrives at an original without noticing any abrupt stylistic transition.

There is something quietly reassuring about a band that approaches famous material without anxiety. WEB WEB neither compete with the originals nor hide behind reverence. They simply listen carefully enough to discover possibilities that others overlooked.

"Kover Kover" ultimately argues that interpretation is itself a creative act. Songs survive not because they remain unchanged, but because each generation finds new ways of hearing them. Some become louder, others slower, stranger or softer. Occasionally they become jazz. Occasionally they reveal they had been jazz all along.

Few cover albums genuinely expand the lives of the songs they revisit. This one does precisely that, reminding us that the best musicians are rarely collectors of influences. They are translators, fluent in dialects most listeners never realised belonged to the same language.

Archives are strange places. We often imagine them as warehouses of certainty, carefully preserving the past against the erosion of time. Yet every archive also records an absence. It preserves voices whose owners are gone, gestures detached from the hands that made them, music that once belonged to living communities but now survives as an unanswered question. "Malencyk / Lami", released by the Minsk-based interdisciplinary collective Shatkavalka, understands this paradox better than most contemporary projects dealing with historical material. It is not an act of restoration. It is an act of listening.

The double LP unfolds almost like two mirrors facing one another across decades. The first record presents field recordings of Stanislau Malencyk (1928-2007), captured in the late 1990s by ethnographer Mykola Kozienka. The second belongs to Italian sound artist Giovanni Lami, who does not accompany, remix or modernize these recordings. Instead, he responds to them from a respectful distance, acknowledging that some conversations can only happen across time.

Malencyk himself is an extraordinary figure, precisely because history nearly overlooked him. Born in what was then Polish territory before becoming part of Belarus, he never received formal musical training, nor did he possess expensive instruments. He simply played. Self-built violins, harmonicas, melodies learned by ear, endless weddings, village celebrations, departures, reunions. Music was not performance in the modern sense but a social necessity, woven into everyday life with the same naturalness as baking bread or harvesting fields.

Listening to these archival performances today requires a certain adjustment of expectations. Their value does not lie in technical perfection. Quite the opposite. The recordings are rough, immediate and occasionally fragile, carrying all the imperfections of field documentation. Yet those imperfections become evidence of proximity. One hears not simply melodies but rooms, distances, movement, voices, the subtle friction between musician and environment. These are not museum artefacts frozen behind glass. They still breathe.

The opening succession of polkas, waltzes, mazurkas and tangos reveals something fascinating about rural musical life in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Tradition was never as pure as later romantic myths suggested. Belarusian folk dances coexist naturally with echoes of Central European ballroom traditions, popular interwar repertoire and local improvisation. Malencyk absorbs everything without anxiety over stylistic boundaries. Identity here is porous rather than protected.

There is also immense joy in these performances. Even when recorded decades after the social world that originally nourished them had begun disappearing, they retain an instinctive vitality. One imagines village floors vibrating beneath dancing feet, conversations continuing around the music, children running between adults. The recordings preserve not only songs but traces of communal existence itself.

And then Giovanni Lami enters.

Fortunately, he does not attempt the fashionable gesture of "updating" folk music through electronic accompaniment. That route has produced enough disappointing albums to fill several digital graveyards. Instead, Lami begins from a far subtler premise: if the community surrounding Malencyk no longer exists, perhaps what remains is not the melody itself but its resonance.

Working with MIDI transcriptions, modular synthesis, tape manipulation, live sampling and electroacoustic processing, Lami stretches the original material until recognition becomes secondary to memory. The resulting pieces feel like distant weather systems generated by forgotten dances. Rhythms dissolve into elongated textures, harmonic traces flicker beneath layers of analogue instability, while silence occupies as important a role as sound.

There is something profoundly moving about this refusal to imitate. Lesser artists might have sprinkled folk samples over ambient drones and congratulated themselves on building bridges between tradition and modernity. Lami instead accepts that some distances cannot be erased. His work inhabits that distance rather than pretending it never existed.

The three extended compositions on Side C gradually establish an entirely different relationship with listening. "Zanemakurtza", "Alaska Sundryakea" and "Belash Zankav" seem to emerge from the archival recordings like shapes appearing through fog. They never quite settle into familiar structures, constantly oscillating between presence and disappearance. They resemble memories recalled by someone who never actually lived them.

Side D pushes even further inward. Here, electronics become less technological than geological, layers slowly accumulating until individual gestures lose their identity inside larger sonic landscapes. Lami has often explored the physicality of sound in previous works, drawing from field recording, electroacoustic composition and environmental listening. That experience serves him exceptionally well here. His interventions never overshadow Malencyk because they were never intended to.

The project's visual dimension deserves mention as well. Volha Savic's archival collages avoid nostalgic illustration, instead assembling fragments that behave much like the music itself: incomplete, displaced, suggestive rather than explanatory. Together with the accompanying essays and photographs, the release becomes less an album than a carefully curated ethnographic object.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of "Malencyk / Lami" is its refusal to romanticize loss. Rural Belarus appears neither as an idyllic paradise nor as an irretrievable tragedy. Communities disappear. Languages evolve. Rituals migrate. Memory fragments. None of this can be reversed. Yet something survives, not intact but transformed.

Listening to these two records consecutively produces an almost physical sensation of temporal displacement. The first asks us to imagine a world. The second asks whether imagination itself might become a legitimate form of preservation.

In an era obsessed with immediate access, instant context and algorithmic certainty, this project insists upon slower forms of understanding. It reminds us that heritage is not merely something to conserve, but something we continually renegotiate through listening. Every generation hears the past differently, because every present asks different questions.

"Malencyk / Lami" offers no comforting answers. Instead, it creates an extraordinary meeting place where a self-taught village musician from twentieth-century Belarus and an experimental Italian sound artist quietly discover they have been speaking compatible languages all along. Not identical languages, certainly. But perhaps that is precisely why the conversation feels so alive.

Berlin has long had a peculiar talent for producing bands that sound as though they have escaped from the margins of an art-school notebook. Not polished enough for the mainstream, too playful to be trapped inside academic experimentation, they thrive somewhere between rehearsal rooms, DIY venues and photocopied manifestos. Pieuvre comfortably belong to that lineage. Their second cassette, "Away From Human Behaviour", released jointly by Kitchen Leg Records and Adagio 830, feels less like a carefully calculated sophomore effort than another dispatch from a parallel city where post-punk never became a nostalgia act because it never stopped evolving.

The trio, formed by Pia, Lina and Fege, has already established a distinctive identity within Berlin's underground. Their debut "Hyperstretch" hinted at a chemistry built on jagged guitars, elastic basslines and rhythmic precision, but this new release sharpens that language considerably. They draw obvious inspiration from late-70s and early-80s post-punk, yet refuse to become another band endlessly rearranging the furniture left behind by Gang of Four, Delta 5 or ESG. Instead, they borrow the attitude rather than the blueprint.

What immediately distinguishes Pieuvre is their refusal to sound comfortable. Their songs constantly lean forward, as though equilibrium itself were suspicious. Guitars jab instead of shimmer, rhythms twitch rather than groove conventionally, while melodies emerge almost accidentally from the surrounding angularity. The result is surprisingly danceable, although the dancing involved probably resembles someone enthusiastically trying to assemble IKEA furniture without instructions. Which, in fairness, is also an accurate metaphor for modern adulthood.

Lyrically, "Away From Human Behaviour" explores alienation without surrendering to fashionable cynicism. Work, consumer culture, identity and everyday absurdity become recurring subjects, but Pieuvre approach them with wit instead of resignation. Their observations rarely become preachy because humour remains one of their sharpest political tools. Rather than shouting slogans, they expose contradictions until they begin laughing at themselves.

The multilingual vocals reinforce this sense of fragmented modern existence. English, German and Portuguese coexist naturally throughout the album, reflecting both Berlin's international identity and the band's own refusal to settle inside neat cultural categories. Language becomes another rhythmic element, each syllable contributing its own texture and cadence.

The opening "Geisterbahn" immediately throws listeners into Pieuvre's world with nervous momentum and restless energy. There is something carnival-like beneath its tension, appropriate for a title referencing the ghost train. It suggests that contemporary life itself has become an amusement ride where everyone pretends to be having fun while quietly wondering where the emergency exit might be.

"Cactus" develops one of the album's recurring fascinations: the comparison between human behaviour and the natural world. The promotional notes jokingly ask what distinguishes us from a plant or an inanimate object. The answer, judging from this record, may simply be that humans invented office meetings.

That thread continues brilliantly into "Home Office", perhaps the album's most pointed social observation. Rather than treating remote work as either paradise or dystopia, Pieuvre capture its strange psychological limbo, where domestic intimacy gradually becomes colonised by productivity metrics. Somewhere between the kitchen table and the laptop screen, many people discovered they were commuting without actually travelling anywhere.

Elsewhere, "Executive Love" skewers corporate language with delicious irreverence, while "Wardrobe" and "Roommate" transform seemingly mundane situations into subtle reflections on identity and coexistence. Even "Blueberry Cake", whose title promises comforting domesticity, carries enough irony to remind us that sweetness and unease often arrive together.

Musically, the trio display admirable restraint. These are compact songs, rarely overstaying their welcome. Nothing feels ornamental. Every guitar stab, bass figure and rhythmic accent serves the momentum. Their no-wave influences remain evident, particularly in the deliberately abrasive guitar textures, but there is also a welcome sense of melody that prevents the album from becoming an exercise in aesthetic severity.

One of Pieuvre's greatest strengths lies in their collective identity. No individual appears interested in dominating the music. The songs emerge through interaction rather than hierarchy, reinforcing the communal spirit that has always animated the best underground scenes. This also mirrors the philosophy of Kitchen Leg Records, whose catalogue has consistently championed DIY ethics over commercial polish, embracing cassette culture not as retro fetishism but as an ongoing act of artistic independence.

Andrew Kemp's cover artwork complements the record beautifully, suggesting organisms that exist somewhere between biological and mechanical life. It quietly echoes the album's central question: what exactly separates human beings from the objects and systems they create? The answer becomes increasingly ambiguous as modern existence grows more automated.

There is, perhaps, one delightful contradiction at the heart of "Away From Human Behaviour". Despite its title, this is an intensely human album. Its humour, frustration, awkwardness and curiosity could not belong to anything else. Plants do not worry about alienation. Rocks rarely question capitalism. Octopuses, admittedly, remain suspiciously intelligent, but even they probably have better work-life balance than most of us.

Pieuvre never pretend to possess solutions. Instead, they document the strange choreography of contemporary existence with intelligence, irreverence and infectious energy. They understand that laughter and discomfort are close relatives, particularly when amplified through scratchy guitars and taut rhythms.

In a musical landscape increasingly divided between algorithm-friendly predictability and self-serious experimentation, "Away From Human Behaviour" occupies a far more interesting territory. It is clever without becoming smug, political without becoming didactic, playful without sacrificing substance. Like the best post-punk, it invites you to dance first and think later, only to realise, halfway through the second listen, that it has been making surprisingly sharp observations all along.