Very few acts have been blazing their path on the Scottish scene, like Nuclear Club, who have already performed at Glasgow’s O2 ABC and festivals including Doune the Rabbit Hole and some other Scottish festivals. Formed in 2014 in Perth, the group, Adam Streets, Ross Fraser, Marc Hill, and Mark Marshall, have honed their alchemical blend of guitars, synths, and percussive elements through their magnificent music.
The band is expanding their songwriting range on their newest full-length, “Black Cats Are Bad Luck,” melting post-punk grit with electronic textures to dissect modern anxieties intelligently.
“Hexavalent Chromium” eases the listener into ‘Black Cats Are Bad Luck’ with a propulsive guitar theme and shimmering synths. The vocalist calls out the lyrics, his voice floating above the mix with quiet grace. It establishes a ready soundscape embellished with intricately layered guitars, drums, synthesizers, and harmony vocals, certainly a press to a wide palette of sounds. Its follow-up, “Black Cats Are Bad Luck,” hurries up the tempo with a propulsive indie rock groove and a sing-along chorus. The lyrics portray environmental activists taking protest into their own hands, hinting at the album’s focus on the ideology of acceleration.
The band is excellent at all gear changes, like the dance-ready “It Rests” and the bouncy electro-pop “Lightning Spike.” Later, “Skeleton Fantasy Show” tries to warrant some krautrock rhythms on a glitchy production level.
Epic album closer “Paternoster” is the quintessential of what makes Nuclear Club such an exciting band. As they swirl frenetic rhythms inside cascading textures toward a glorious indie crescendo, the track summarises the sonic palette and ambitious artistic vision of the album. The band’s skill and the chemistry driving it work to perfection. They combine polar styles while masterfully treating lofty topics through bright, artistic melodies, and in this fact lies their excellence.
“Black Cats Are Bad Luck” is full of flowers, as the band approaches everything with syncretism in their seemingly natural attitude toward music. It cements Nuclear Club’s status as the head of a vanguard of artists who interpret modern anxieties through an artistic lens. Neither didactic nor nihilistic, the band translates these weighty ideas into songs you lose yourself in. I would say it kept me hooked from one repeat play to the next. While some of those tracks might start sounding like a blur in their echoes of dystopian urbanity, I was impressed by the fact that this band consistently manages to carve special emotional vignettes within its terrain.
“Black Cats Are Bad Luck” advances its way deeply into your psyche, and I found myself continually returning to rediscover new perspectives within its carefully woven sonic tapestry. For anyone in search of an artfully rendered summary of modern neuroses set to some seriously compelling tunes, I highly recommend they give this stunning album a stream.