Bleep

Amnesia Scanner don’t do easy listening. Anyone thinking that the Finnish duo might have taken their foot off the gas for second LP Tearless needs to leave those assumptions at the door - something the record’s lurid, disturbing cover artwork makes crystal-clear.

Indeed, Tearless may even go deeper into the murky depths than any of Amnesia Scanner’s previous work. The group’s writhing, caustic sound has always been difficult to characterise, but the core tenets remain - industrial music, deconstructed club, power electronics and the most confrontational end of noise music are all churned up by the pair into strange and foreboding tracks. Sometimes jerkily danceable beats emerge from Tearless’s soup of sound, either coalescing into what could possibly described as ultra-ultra-leftfield hip-hop or something like the clattering rhythm tracks of Fever Ray.

Tearless is also one of a wave of albums released in 2020 which reinvigorate sounds from nu-metal and metalcore. However, Amnesia Scanner do some far more extreme things with these sonic archetypes than Grimes or Rina Sawayama did. ‘AS Flat’, a collaboration with metalcore group Code Orange, warps into a nightmarish reimagining of This Heat, while the Lalita-featuring ‘AS Tearless’ chews up its riff to emerge sounding like a Travis Scott track forged in the fires of hell.

Intense, ferocious and richly rewarding, Amnesia Scanner’s new LP Tearless is another singular statement from this truly original outfit.