Kompromat

Kompromat is the third album from Portuguese trio 10 000 Russos and arrives following their second album Distress Distress and a collab LP with Dutch industrialists and Fuzz Club label-mates Radar Men From The Moon. Though tapping into the same transcendental minimalism of bands like Neu!, Suicide and Faust, 10 000 Russos have a sound that is solely their own: João Pimenta's machine-like percussion and brooding vocal drawls sound like a cyborg Mark E. Smith drearily narrating the end-of-times atop the abrasive guitar manipulations and experimental loops of Pedro Pestana and driving, motorik basslines that are seemingly summoned from the most depraved corners of André Couto’s psyche. That’s been 10 000 Russos ever-evolving template for many years and on Kompromat it’s amped up tenfold and delivered with a new-found urgency. Taking its name from the Soviet-era Russian term for ‘compromising material’ gathered on politicians and business owners as leverage to blackmail and coerce, the monolithic drones heard on Kompromat hint at a two-fold revolution – a subconscious upheaval, as well as a socio-political one. They say of the record: “Like all of our work, the songs started from jams and were worked from there but this record feels fatter and has this kind of dance-y vibe to it. Unlike Distress Distress it feels like there is a sense of release there, despite the oppressive feeling that runs through a lot of the album.”