Yesterday, the mightily reliable Sacred Bones label announced the January release of Paradise, the third full-length by Brooklyn foursome Pop. 1280, and revealed a song, “Pyramids on Mars.”
The press release begins, “Human culture has reached its terminus.” No, it’s not that Sacred Bones asserts Paradise as the species’ creative apex. Rather, Paradise thematically hinges on the troubling confluence of technology, surveillance, and commerce, along with humans’ everyday complicity in the pervasive axis of power.
And yet, Paradise is also the outfit’s most thoroughly produced and electronically augmented album to date. “Pyramids on Mars”, the opening track, features a forbidding synth vamp and percussive clamor. Deeply political as the content may be, Chris Bug’s anguished lament about the titular structural anomalies also underscores Pop. 1280’s unabashedly stylized goth inclinations. Indeed, the doomsday scenario in which all quite happily and wittingly participate is perfectly dramatic fodder for Pop. 1280.
