After several years of gestation, following a string of live sets in the northwest Nevada area and 2019’s tease EP Medeocre Man, Reno-raised punk miscreant Clarko drops his long-awaited debut album with an unannounced invitation befitting his nervy new wave; poised squat-like unsheathing a katana threatening either to swiftly disembowel you in one fell swoop, or likely clumsily fall onto his sword and impale himself.

Twitchy anxiety and spectacular mishap mulch all over Welcome to Clarko, out via Iron Lung Records. Mosquito guitars, rubbery keyboards, and cartoonish nasal whines all rub and squeak together like flat balloons in a synthpunk offering of ten eggy splatters gunked with feverish anxiety. Initial single ‘Stifled’ establishes the wiry sinew of his stringy post-punk perfectly, with its jerky bass and back-to-front guitar solos lovingly lifted from early Devo all jumbling together frictionally like a maddening ring in the ears, while queasy gobs of fizzing synthesizers from the Pere Ubu school of electronic disquiet permeate on the terse ‘Social Psychic Vampire’.

While the sonic territory that’s tread follows a path already ventured by acts such as Secret Agent Headcheese or Set-Top Box, Clarko’s ambitious musical chops and love for sunny psych ensure the album isn’t an imitator. LP opener ‘Alien Touch’ starts off snotty and tangy enough, but ascends its devocore jab into motorik propulsion with haunts of woodwind that recall Neu! or Can at their best. The moody skulk of ‘Driveway’ points to a subtle sense of drama with its Tom Verlaine riffs and pulsing throbs illustrating suburbia’s sudden deaths and their spectral residue, and starker hues of haunt are touched on the chiller ‘Your Turn’ with its ‘S.I.B. (Swelling Itching Brain)’ style sequencers and atonal angst.

With such an entrance that Clarko’s sword-wielding album cover lands you with, you’re hoping the music that follows lives up to its promise? You needn’t worry. Welcome to Clarko is a superb debut that was well worth the wait, an acrid bleach of infectiously uneasy post-punk and wormy garage which leaves you in its own special film long after you’ve first played it.