It’s a good time to be angry, horny, and queer. The electroclash revival has been pulsing for years and, with recent releases from scene originators Ladytron, Peaches, and Chicks on Speed, as well as brainrotted young artists like MGNA Crrrta and Tiffany Day, it’s now throbbing at full power. The stripped-down technopunk kept Lower East Side bars of ill repute gacked out in the months and years after 9/11, soundtracking a party at ground zero that didn’t just feel the terror of the moment but embraced the opportunity to build something new in its place. Despite its hedonistic reputation—or, rather, in tandem with its hedonistic reputation—electroclash was a way to fight oppression with the power of sounding super, super gay. Of course it’s making a comeback.
While Detroit’s ADULT. were part of the genre’s initial spurt in the ’00s, and even performed on the eponymous tour that emerged from New York’s Electroclash Festival (inaugurated in October 2001, naturally), their music has always had a harder edge than that of their peers. The minimal, vinegary sound they’ve developed over the last 30 years is closer in feel to the early EBM of DAF and Nitzer Ebb, while singer Nicola Kuperus’ sloganeering is too pointed to be sexy. For her and Adam Lee Miller—ADULT.’s sole other member and Kuperus’ spouse—this music is an embodied form of community-making and critique, a way of serving vicious jeremiads whose potency is too strong to be ignored no matter how hard you’re dancing. Peaches was right, you should fuck the pain away; ADULT.’s 10th album, Kissing Luck Goodbye, is here to incite revenge on the people who caused it in the first place.
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Kissing Luck Goodbye feels like a soft reset for Kuperus and Miller. The duo greatly expanded their sample library, ripping random melodies from thrift-store records and manipulating their own field recordings. “No Song” uses a snatch of static for its snare and what sounds like a kettle drum being played in a cave for its kick; a squealing synth sprints circles around “No One Is Coming”’s beefy bass line like a haunted theremin.
Such attention to detail is crucial to the success of these songs. Unlike 2022’s densely packed Becoming Undone, Kissing Luck Goodbye feels lean and sinewy, in fighting shape. The songs sprint past with a minimalist economy that matches the intensity of Kuperus’ vocals. Her style is rich with character, and she shifts between deliveries quickly and with conviction. At times she sounds like B-52’s’ Cindy Wilson filling in for her bandmate Fred Schneider, using the sweetness of her natural voice to spike an off-beat exclamation into the music. “Suck out your eyes/Fuck your head,” she sings over synths that dart like agitated minnows in “Destroyers.” She delivers many of her lyrics with the insouciance of Johnny Rotten, like she’s mocking your desire for a straightforward melody. “Your entertainment has been/disrupted,” she sings in “Kissing Luck Goodbye,” sounding like Anthony Kiedis reciting lines from Barbara Kruger. Any one of these vocal strategies would easily overwhelm less thought-out programming, but Kuperus’ mildly campy sing-bark moves in tandem with the rough textures of the music she and Miller create together.