Nuclear missiles poised. Hamzat suits on. The pitiless gaze of a Raytheon shareholder overlooks a world engulfed in global conflict as he oversees ever greater profit margins the lucrative war business rewards him. With hyper-stylised punk-zine, collage assemblage of WWIII evocations around anime cut-ous, Los Angeles synthpunk outfit Neocons‘ cover for debut EP could be dismissed as a juvenile indulgence in empty, nihilistic chic, but have you watched the news?! It’s gettin’ crazy out there…

Being the latest front by Paisley Shirt Records associate Alex Machock, a potent love for Chrome’s acid-soaked shredding and the caustic electronics of early Cabaret Voltaire have warranted a new and terrible mutoid sub-label from Paisley’s typical roster to serve Machock’s dystopian vision; Industrial Cowboy. Sharing the same viral fetish for tech-noir Industrial to East Coast laptop punx Nervous Guy, Neocons emits a similarly smouldering electrical fire of detuned MS-20s and rodent guitar pedals to score the blurring line between sci-fi trope and tech-ravaged, contemporary rot.

Jagged, agitated bass opens EP with the skulking strut of ‘Shoot/Kill’, a title that touches the nerve of an America scarred by risk-averse police forces with itchy trigger-fringers. Gnawed guitars spurt amid an aural soup of garbled voices and molten media slop that feels spewed from the CNN robots expelling corporate sludge day in, day out. ‘New Boots’ leans toward a more spiky synthpop detour, Martial Canterel’s brittle drum machine twitches beneath a cold spotlight on auxiliary obedience and a massive industrial military complex which pulls its strings, before oozing into the dirty acid beats of the eponymous of sorts track ‘N.E.O.C.O.N.S.’, the corroded murmurs of faceless authority whispering nuclear horror hanging throughout its entirety. After ‘Perleche’ has polluted you with its noxious smog of split and cracked metallic acidity, ‘Hardcore (Violent World)’ encapsulates the algorithmic hellscape EP is spawned from; a pastiche of NWOBHM filtered through a shoddy, third-party plugin that captures the nasty sting of a reality switched to ‘hard mode’ by remote, corporate string-pullers.

With synthpunk arguably more popular than it’s ever been, Machock cuts a distinct take on the crowded drum machine lo-fi miasma with EP, a bitter and acerbic wander of neoconservative ruin that’s infused with comic-book distance to ward off the weight of its all-too-real dystopia.