Total Control’s new 12″, ‘Laughing At The System,’ is described by the band as a succinct statement, “but it feels like the sharpest we’ve ever assembled”. Written and recorded over the past couple of years in various lounge rooms, bedrooms, and rehearsal studios, across Melbourne, regional Victoria, and Western Australia, Al Montfort, Daniel Stewart, James Vinciguerra, Mikey Young, and Zephyr Pavey are-for the record-all accounted for in the process.

Drizzled with Vinciguerra’s fraught fills, which have the rare quality of being unmistakably his in both electronic and acoustic form, this punctuation comes in and out of focus between elegiac moments and breezy experimentation, the latter including the elated instrumental ‘Cathie and Marg.’ Throughout, Stewart scripts a tumultuous wake for a flatlining reality, forever nudging the listener to second-guess themselves about the sincerity and intent. Far from cynical, but earnestly neurotic, the potency of the atmosphere that Total Control has mustered across ‘Laughing At The System’ registers as a deeply commanding, though bleak, psychedelicism for the future.

Total Control
Laughing At The System 12″
UK/EU: Alter (12.8.17)
JP: Big Love Records (1.15.18)

1 – Laughing At The System 1
2 – Future Crème
3 – Vanity
4 – Vote Cops
5 – Her Majesty, Budgie
6 – Luxury Vacuum
7 – Cathie and Marg
8 – Laughing At The System 2