South West post-punks Neurotic Fiction are back with a new EP on Specialist Subject Records. Writing back in 2018 on the album Pulp Music, we described their sound as “the angular, jerky raw ingredients of 80s post-punk” crafted into “infectious pop songs,” each track marked by a sense of fun and enjoyment that hurdle over any self-consciousness or pretension. As we continued:
Pulp Music is an album content to do its own thing, to revel in its own ephemerality and to confront the weird world we live in with a sense of sly humour. By embracing the throwaway nature of pop music, Neurotic Fiction forgo society’s relentless and destructive sense of ambition, instead celebrating what they describe as “the strange comfort in admitting we may never really amount to anything.”
Romance has been been described as Neurotic Fiction’s “final exhalation,” which might not bode well for the longevity of the project but certainly charges things with a newfound sense of urgency. Opener ‘Assimilate’ shows this off, the barely two minute run-time encapsulating what you’ll find across the rest of the record. It’s a quick dose of scrappy post-punk—like a lost gem that’s sat on a forgotten mixtape for forty years before being unearthed by a cassette archaeologist, still boasting its rollicking energy and defiant edge.
Wiry synths hold together ‘Mi Mi Mi Mascota’ as it advances in a nocturnal swagger, while ‘Leather, Bristles, Studs, Acne’ sounds breathless and swivel-eyed as it’s bombarded with frantic percussion. But it’s closer ‘Happy Goth’ that’s the standout, adding sparkling surfy vibes to Romance‘s otherwise shadowy post-punk. As the title suggests, it’s a song about a person’s uneasy emergence from gloom, all thanks to another’s altogether sunnier outlook. It’s still twitchy and agitated, but hints that by the end of Romance, Neurotic Fiction may have worked their way past some of those neuroses, or at least become confident enough to accept them for what they are.
I say “life’s to be endured”
You postulate it’s to be enjoyed
It’s a new theorem to me
You’re changing my biology
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Romance is out now on Specialist Subject Records and you can get it from the Neurotic Fiction Bandcamp page.