Marionette EP

Newly signed to indie heavyweights Heist or Hit, home to Westside Cowboy and Her’s, Makeshift Art Bar return with their second EP, Marionette, produced by Daniel Fox of Sprints, Melts, Psychotic Monks, Naked Lungs, Nerves and Ronan Group.

The band describe the record like this: “The theme of the marionette is present throughout each song, involving some aspect of a power struggle and a lack of control within oneself.” It’s a thread that runs through every track here, tying together a set of songs that feels sharp, unsettling and brilliantly alive.

Opening track Chocolate arrives on a synth line as slippery and hyperactive as anything Aphex Twin ever put to tape. Crispy offbeat electronic cymbals cut against atonal guitars and forceful drumming before the whole thing dry-wretches into a chaotic rush of euphoria. Lyrically, it centres on crippling social anxiety and the pull of an unflattering, lonely reality.

On Crows, the muted guitar pluck of the intro feels like the sonic equivalent of biting your nails, an anxious involuntary tic that fits its theme of guilt, especially in relation to digital culture: “children can watch what they please, just with viewer discretion.” The track shifts constantly between textures, moving in and out of focus. Guitars flare like sirens in a paranoid city at 2am, while the bass carries the weight of an insomniac mind running on no REM sleep.

Discipline brings a metallic intensity that sits heavy, with a beat as industrial and unrelenting as its subject matter. It tells the story of a soldier confronting the lies that led him to carry out violent, atrocious acts, with the pain of accountability pushing through every second of the arrangement.

Closing track Servant begins like a Spectrum loading screen, all dial-up coded electronics, white-noise heaves and existential bloops. It takes a more abstract approach to the EP’s core ideas, filtering power struggle through religious imagery and a painful self-awareness of one’s own actions, alongside an inability to control them. The band build layer upon layer until everything collapses and the signal burns out. Connection severed.

Across the EP, vocalist Joseph repeatedly returns to themes of control and unhappiness, creating spaces where doom and isolation bounce around the walls. Still, the band are clear-eyed about what they’re trying to do: “we like to think that by shedding light on the negative, it commands a sense of hope.”

Drawing influence from the liminal horror and uncanny dread of Silent Hill, the existential theatre of The Twilight Zone and the absurdity of Twin Peaks, Makeshift Art Bar exist in a space between unease and impulse. They are not a band interested in being liked. They are a band interested in being necessary.

There is so much packed into these songs that one listen never feels like enough. Each return reveals another detail, another texture, another strange turn. Audacious, idiosyncratic and vital, Makeshift Art Bar sound like a young band carrying identity, defiance and an uncompromising vision without a hint of hesitation.