Jump to playlist

Station Model Violence is the self-titled debut from the six-piece post-punk group, released locally on Anti Fade. Vocalist DX (Daniel Stewart of Total Control and The UV Race) relocated to Sydney at the end of 2022, finding new collaborators in Buz Clatworthy and Alan Gojak from R.M.F.C., Micky Grossman and Michael Hassett from Den, and saxophonist Nick Kuceli from Gaud. These ten tracks draw from three separate pools: Buz's unused demos, material from an earlier unrealised band called KX Aminal, and songs written collectively by the final lineup.

The sound draws on motorik rock, with serrated guitar lines, saxophone and occasional piano running through the ten tracks. DX has cited a moment in a BBC Krautrock documentary where Iggy Pop describes Neu! as "pastoral psychedelicism" as a guiding reference point. Mikey Young, the Eddy Current Suppression Ring guitarist who's engineered and mixed records for much of Melbourne's underground, tracked the local sessions and mixed the album.

The album deals in surveillance anxiety and the texture of modern life. 'Heat' is at the centre, an eight-minute track built on a locked-in groove that accumulates layers of instrumentation and feedback as it goes. 'Drip Away' is what DX calls a song about AI-driven apocalypse. 'Immolation' trades in what he describes as "mould music", the claustrophobic feeling of being consumed by damp and decay. 'Cliffs' is a piano-led piece written by Micky Grossman and inspired by John Cale's Paris 1919. And 'Falling Down' closes the record with what amounts to a message of hope: don't allow the brutality of modern life to break you.