Witnessing any one of New York visual artist Ben Mendelewicz‘s music videos and record covers is like two alien fingers plunged into your eyeballs, twisting around several times to ensure maximum brain jabbing before extending its slimy, elongated tongue to lick the grey matter and ocular fluid off its many digits. Garish, gooey, gross, Mendelewicz’s warped style found itself right at home among the kindred mutants that make up the weird and brilliant Haord Records.

Not content just corrupting the visual arts, Mendelewicz teamed up with Mark Matthews in 2015 to unleash Macula Dog, a congealed splatter of performance art, fucked-up electronics and eye-popping multi-media theatrics. Like some little bastard brother of The Residents kept locked in the attic for being even weirder than they, Macula Dog have steadily released a string of aggressively strange albums and E.P.s which established the Macula Dog sound: cartoonish donk and kids game show candy saturated with vocoder gunge and synth ooze. Jumping from Haord Records to Wharf Cat Records and inviting Paul D. Millar (from Aerial Pink’s band) to lend his engineering chops, Macula Dog has dared to inject a little pop into their latest offering, Breezy.

Recorded completely live to a 16 track tape, Breezy‘s four pieces are satisfyingly blemished and imperfect, each warble and atonal convulse captured organically. E.P. opener ‘Popping Hot Balloons’ is an urgent flurry of an 8-bit percussion and disjointed keyboards that rub, stretch, and squeak against each other like chewing flat balloons. Vocal slime gunks on the baffling title track, an expert display of keen sequencing skills that play out in a jumbled fashion, each bass throb teetering on the edge of collapsing into a mess of bleeps and screeches. The sonic stretching, inflation, and pulling-apart continue on the taut ‘Red’s Corvette’ before the animated ‘Lissajous’ (named after Jules Antoine Lissajous’s famous curve equation) bring the E.P. to a sludgy resolve of swamped synth gurgles and brittle vocal croaks curdling together with pleasing melodies and psych guitar licks under the electronic soup.

Alien, gelatinous, absurd, Macula Dog’s latest conjuring Breezy is another beguiling slice of strange which hasn’t been compromised by their embrace of pop sensibilities and outside production.