Dead: Verse

Last year's Transmusicales festival in Rennes gave me the chance to catch a huge number of new acts  for the first time, and it's been a pleasure to keep up with what they've been doing since.

Dead were one band I got the opportunity to see live, having already heard some of their work, and it was great to see the release of a new four track EP by the Rennes-based trio entitled Verse at the end of last month.

Writing in the aftermath of the show last year, I said they had  "Echoes of late 80s post-industrial electronic dance acts like Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb" and how there might be some references to The Sisters of Mercy, they sounded like the kind of band that the Sisters of Mercy probably wish they were today.

"Their music might well be no stranger to the sounds of the dancefloor of a punk night at a student union in the late 80s, but Dead are very much a product of the 2010s musical environment" , I said at the time, and this EP shows the band taking some of the inspiration from that scene and dragging it into the 21st century.

The new material on the Verse EP on KdB records is as intense a piece of dark electronic rock as you could hope for, dense and unashamedly epic in its scale.  I want to listen to this at a ridiculous volume, with dry ice in the air, strobe lighting and a pint of cider and blackcurrant in hand.

Dead play the Bus Palladium in Paris on October 10 and at the 1988 club in Rennes on October 11.