Group Zero - Everyone’s Already Come Apart

Five track mini-album from Belfast's Group Zero which bridges the gap between post-punk moroseness, techno austerity and Berlin School impressionism, and in doing so seeks out some very icey, dystopic territory. This is as grey the Northern Irish sky, soul (should it have one) the colour of a switched off TV screen. With a title like that, the writing was already on the wall. Opener Memorial Hall - the name of which alludes to themes explored throughout: time, memory, decay - is plaintive and suggestive, an eerie introduction that splits the difference between Werkbund's Weit Draussen and early Tangerine Dream. What follows is a little more linear in construction, techno-not-techno explorations with an industrial strut. It's the ten-minute closer that stays in the memory longest, a bass-led drone backed with woozy, time-dilating synths that somehow seems both nostalgic and foretelling of a future world soon to end. Prophetic! Heavy-hearted, grey-stained pessimism, and in that way perfectly fitting of 2021. Another addition to that brilliant lineage of sullen Northern Irish expression.