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HAYWARDxDÄLEK (Relapse, 2025)

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This excellent and unusual collaboration between septuagenarian This Heat drummer Charles Hayward and Dälek’s Will Brooks was written/improvised over two “feverish” days during a brief 2023 residency in Salford. By the end of a single “whirlwind week,” the songs were recorded, rehearsed, and performed live at Fat Out Fest (also in Salford, conveniently). Normally, that kind of condensed, improvisation-heavy time crunch tends to result in a middling, half-baked release that is best avoided, but HAYWARDxDÄLEK is the rare exception to that trend, as this album often feels like a vision greater than the sum of its parts rather than a mere interesting collision of divergent aesthetics. Some of that is certainly due to the fact that Brooks took the live recordings back to his studio to add some verses and perfect the mixing, but Hayward’s drumming would still be impressively inventive and compelling even if this album had been recorded raw on a boombox or cell phone instead.

The opening “Increments” provides a fairly representative introduction to the duo’s overarching vision, as it can reasonably be described as “ambient Dälek with a live drummer.” That makes perfect sense, given the extreme time constraints and the fact that the instrumentation is mostly limited to just a synth and some samplers. It is definitely one of the album’s more minimal and improv-heavy pieces, as it is essentially just a murkily futuristic and nightmarish post-industrial atmosphere, a submerged bass motif, and a simple beat, but Hayward’s relentless high-hat slices through the murk in enjoyably visceral fashion. 

Things get quite a bit more interesting with the following “Between the Word and the Drum,” however, as Brooks takes the mic and Hayward unleashes a shape-shifting and serpentine tribal rhythm. Notably, the vibe is considerably more evil-sounding this time around and Brooks occasionally doubles his vocals with subtly psychedelic effects. It is a legitimate banger, as is the following “Breathe Slow,” which is by far the most hip-hop-inspired piece on the album, as Brooks drops some fiery verses over a boom-bap beat and a cool frayed and pulsing sample.

My favorite piece, however, is “Salvage,” which beautifully combines churning, frayed, and flickering Fennesz-esque chords with pounding tribal drums and a cool Middle Eastern-sounding melody that keeps mutating and folding back upon itself like an Ouroboros. To my ears, it is every bit as great as some of This Heat’s more iconic pieces, which is definitely not something I expected to be saying about a Charles Hayward release in 2025. I am also a big fan of the more slow-building “Sojourn,” which gradually evolves from a bittersweet melodica solo over a soft-focus ambient meditation into something resembling shimmering Seefeel/Bark Psychosis-style post-rock enhanced with virtuosically tumbling and stammering drumming. 

In fact, Hayward’s endlessly shifting, tumbling, stuttering, and off-kilter drum performances are my absolute favorite thing about this album (“Yo sir, you’re burning me!”). Unsurprisingly, Brooks occasionally fires off some great lines himself (“generational pain built with compound interest”) and there are some cool musical ideas to be found as well, but the most revelatory aspect of this album is definitely the inventive way that Hayward subverts rhythmic expectations and masterfully stretches, bends, and blurs time. I first noticed that effect in the otherwise straight-forward hip-hop track “Asymmetric,” as Hayward seems to deliberately drag slightly behind the beat rather than setting his sights on rocking the party. 

While his heroic efforts sadly failed to elevate that particular piece into yet another album highlight, it gradually became clear to me that even the most improvised-sounding stretches of the album were deliciously unpredictable because the beat was almost always dragging, tumbling, collapsing, or drifting out of the expected pattern in cool and interesting ways. Speaking as someone who was once a terrible punk drummer who had his hands full simply keeping a consistent beat going, anyone who can intuitively wander in and out the groove (while still playing cool fills) seems like a goddamn sorcerer to me. I expect other fans of excellent drumming will be similarly entranced by Hayward’s subtle rhythmic brilliance. Of course, the flip side is that I suppose some Dälek fans will wish that Brooks had a more prominent vocal presence or that these songs were a bit more intense and layered, but HAYWARDxDÄLEK certainly feels like an extremely cool detour from where I am standing.  

Listen here.

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The Bug, “Machine” (Relapse, 2024)

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This is Kevin Martin’s first solo instrumental release as The Bug, which is a bit surprising given that he has been devoted to dread-soaked industrial dub mutations for roughly three decades now. These particular dread-soaked mutations were originally released as a series of five EPs of self-described “floor weapons” on Martin’s own Pressure label. I cannot argue with the “floor weapons” claim, as Machine is essentially an unbroken run of slow-motion bangers and seismic bass throbs, but the unifying aesthetic of those bangers is the more interesting bit, as Martin envisioned a new strain of “ice cold and dystopian” futuristic dub. That may seem like an eyebrow-raising claim, given that Martin is no stranger at all to futuristic/dystopian/mechanized menace, but I was legitimately caught off guard by how much the absence of any recognizably human element would transform my listening experience in both obvious and less obvious ways.

The twelve pieces collected on Machine are presented in chronological order based upon their original release date, but the album only includes roughly half of the complete “Machine” series. That, of course, means that Martin’s curatorial vision played a significant role in shaping the album’s trajectory. As the album unfolds, however, I can easily hear how Martin’s overarching vision evolved and expanded with each new installment, though it is still reasonable to describe Machine as “variations on a theme” with the theme being pummeling slow-motion machine rhythms, sludgy and seismic deep bass, a healthy dose of snarling and smoldering noise, and absolutely nothing else except the occasional wobbly and reverberating chord.

In lesser hands, I would consider that a dangerously monochromatic and constrained palette, but in Martin’s case it is more of a focused one. The difference lies in what Martin does with his limited materials: by cutting away any unnecessary clutter, he ensures that each of these pieces feels like an unstoppable mechanized juggernaut teeming with rich and vividly realized textures that squirm, buzz, seethe, and pan through space in mesmerizing fashion. This is the sort of album where the appeal can be summarized as “throw on some headphones or blast this album through a killer sound system and its pleasures will be immediately and seismically evident.” That said, the latter option may also reduce your home to rubble, but that would only enhance the album’s dystopian and post-human vibes in the short term.

While I certainly dig several pieces on the album’s first half (particularly the relentlessly crunching and blunted reggae chug of “Floored (Point of Impact)”), it is clear that Martin only got better and better at realizing his vision as the series unfolded, so most of the stronger pieces fall closer to the end. In fact, just about everything from “Hypnotised (F-cked up)” onward is a master class in crushing, speaker-straining heavyweight dub sorcery. In the case of “Hypnotised,” the allure is primarily the stomping, fuzzed-out, and hissing reggae shuffle, but there are plenty of other entrancing features to be found beyond Martin’s beats. For example, the insistently thudding beat of “Bodied (Send For the Hearse)” is mostly just an effective delivery device for plunging nightmare bass and a gnarled miasma of textured layers, while the more spacious “Exit (Wasteman)” feels like a city is collapsing in slow-motion around me while I stand mesmerized by a panning cymbal motif that resembles a psychedelic sprinkler or swarm of alien crickets. Elsewhere, “Departed (Left The Body Behind)” slays on all cylinders, as its blackened chug makes me feel like I am riding the nightmare train to mindfuck city and passing through all manner of lysergic vistas along the way.

Listening to this album deeply, I was struck by how much I have taken Kevin Martin for granted over the years, as no one other than Martin could have made an album like this because no one else brings together such a perfect intermingling of uncompromising sound design, mixing perfection, a deep understanding of dub technique and sound system history, excellent and wide-ranging taste, and a wildly ambitious and iconoclastic vision. If any single one of those elements were missing, Machine would not be nearly as great as it is, but they are all present and Machine consequently sounds fucking amazing. In hindsight, being reminded of Martin’s ‘90s Macro Dub Infection series of compilations brings everything into perfect clarity, as Martin has been tirelessly mutating heavy music’s DNA with Jamaican dub chromosomes for decades now with increasingly impressive results. On this album, it sounds a lot like Godflesh was the original host, but Jamaican reggae’s sensuous sway is considerably more present here than it is any of Justin Broadrick’s own dub excursions and this is just one stage of an ongoing mutation that could lead wherever Martin’s endlessly evolving aesthetic steers him. Hell, this album is even fascinating on a philosophical level, as it feels like Martin carved out the human element that exists between the poles of “animal” and “machine” to create a futuristic nightmare hybrid of the mechanized and the feral. Neat trick.

Listen here.