“Einstrzende Neubauten producer Boris Wilsdorf, Karl OConnor aka Regis and MY DISCO’s Liam Andrews assemble as EROS, bottling no-wave/industrial lightning with a tight set of pulverized, widescreen torched-songs that rasp, grate and throb somewhere between This Heat, The Cure, Cabaret Voltaire, Alva Noto x Pan Sonic.

An industrial fantasy of flesh and steel, A Southern Code is the stunning continuation of the trios work at Wilsdorfs pivotal Anderesbaustelle studio on Regis watershed album, Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss. Rejoined by another key muse, Anni Hogan, and Einstrzende Neubautens Jochen Arbeit, they effectively galvanised a new band, EROS, during long days and nights in the studio across 2020 and into 2021. The sound they make is fiercely lean, shaped by Wilsdorfs manacled mixing and anchored in the frankly sexy as f#ck swerve of Regis vocals and his snake-hipped rhythm section.

The first songs issued from those sessions form a lustrous new high point of contemporary industrial and dance music, one porous to Kurdish dabke as much as archetypal goth, pulsing with a metallic bloodlust and spatialized by Wilsdorfs genre-forming tekkerz in a way that seriously rewards with proper amplification. Judged on its immediate merits, its the sort of record that could have feasibly come out at any point between the 80s and now, but closer inspection reveals a discreet framework of sculpted subbass and sleekly rolling traction that betrays the modernity of minimalist D&B physics and up-to-the-second sound design that places A Southern Code in a timeless echelon.

Registering the venomous drums and over-the-shoulder whispers of its title track, plus the incendiary middle eastern horns of The Crawling Man – a real parallel dimension take on The Cures The Top – to the post-apocalyptic lounge lizard styles of In This Place, and the unheimlich creep to Nature Unborn (From Sun to Sun), the bands first album plants a vital stake in the ground for industrial musick at the crest of a new decade.”