Apparently, the source of the signal hijack known as Isotope Soap hails from Stockholm, although you’d have to take the band’s word for it. Surely this is some top-secret, extraterrestrial invasion, corrupting your speakers like the Max Headroom incident static puking into your mind fuzzy detuned images of alien encounters, psychic warfare, and Japanese office employees overworking to death. It’s hard to decipher in their garbled message whether they’re warning or mocking humanity. It’s likely both.

Mixing hardcore and the synth alienation of Chrome and The Screamers, long-time Swedish punk legend Peter Swedenhammar’s new bastard birthed project Isotope Soap is the corrosive face of the synthpunk renaissance alongside Leeches, POW!, and the roster of artists on scuzzy Sydney label Warttmann Inc. Donning radioactive PPE and black boiler suits, the band strike a truly warped impression when witnessed live, and their string of brilliantly septic singles and E.P.’s have garnered them a horde of misfits salivating for a proper debut album.

Despite clocking in at only 14 minutes, An Artifact of Insects slithers around a wide array of styles and murk. Tracks like ‘Fragile Dream’ and ‘T-T-T-Telepathic’ are quintessential synthpunk, glorious punk rock urgency rushing apace with fizzy analogues that thrust you straight into the heady era of San Fran art-punk from the late ’70s. Eerie, caustic electronics throb and pulse on stingers like ‘Hey, Karoshi!’ and ‘Zanfretta’, the latter a haunting trip of spiky sinewaves and sonic dissonance conjuring the green creatures of the Torriglia 1984 case. The disparate turns the record makes are all held together by expert vocoder and voice effects, Swedenhammar’s electronically treated vocals forever contorting to a high-pitched squeal or buzzing Dalek angst, often at the same time.

Subterranean and acrid, An Artifact of Insects is a fantastic psych-slurry of twisted electro and punk delinquency, the kinda music Nero would have fiddled while Rome burned were he an LSD soaked robot from the future.