Hey, remember dubstep? How about polio?
Dubstep is a genre with a far richer and longer history than is normally given credit for, but read that up on your own time, not mine. The brostep we know it to be now was invented in 2010 by a pre-eminent e-boy twink called Skrillex, who one day trapped a pigeon inside of a subwoofer and dosed it with a thoughtful amount of his own adrenochrome, until his neighbours complained about the very acrid smell of distorted basslines.
If ever so slightly preceding him in this market was the UK dance trio NERO, whose middling late noughties singles built a path towards Welcome Reality. This debut full-length is a project which has aged far more gracefully than many brostep contemporaries through not quite fully buying into the bassline-gnarling arms race already ongoing, and leaning back on some more french housey sensibilities.
After eleven years inactive, what’s brought them back now with this new release? Into the Unknown still carries the exact shade of aggression as the old brostep, but often draped into far more DnB rhythms, such as in tracks Talking to God and The Unknown. It’s Talking to God out of the two which lands its hits harder and sillier, whereas The Unknown becomes a bit too self-serious in trying to sell this vibe packaged in NERO’s classic over-cinematic string washes.
The album bounces around as a little genre exploration to a touch of synthwave in Gravity and Solar, to some french house in Running from Reality, to some quality results. But it is the exact same post-apocalyptic, SciFi movie aesthetic which NERO has chucked over this whole album, for a third time around now. Lots of big dramatic orchestras, lots of lyrics along the lines of how it is our universal destiny to kiss or to not kiss each other. It wasn’t particularly cutting edge stuff the first time truth be told, though dance music gets to have a bit of a hall pass from thematic complexity right. But is this really all we get to have? I don’t know! Switch it up and make the next one themed on Clint Eastwood westerns, or anything else. Scooby Doo?
A more damningly simple issue with what has happened to the sound of NERO, and not from any fault of their own is, uh, their exact vibe has now become the car advert sound. I don’t recall exactly if I ever saw any of their specific tracks popping up in front of shots of family-sized SUVs, but I feel Pavlov’s dogged into anticipating the mileage of a Škoda Kodiaq to be read out to me through most of this album.
This comeback proves to be lackluster in bringing about any substantially new ideas for NERO, and the exact most dated ones are here in full display. But hey, if a nostalgia trip is what you are after, and more of the same from NERO is all you need, you’ll have a great time.
This writer for this heathenous site, however, will be giving this one a 4/10.