Melbourne’s screensaver never dealt in half-measures, but Three Lens Approach plays like they finally decided to quit apologizing for restraint and just let the electricity spill everywhere. The band (Krystal Maynard, Christopher Stephenson, James Beck, Dorian Vary, and Jonnine Nokes) move like five mismatched transmitters catching interference from the same feverish broadcast. There’s a charge to the whole affair, like someone kicked the plug out of the wall mid-party and everyone kept dancing anyway.
The record spirals around a single question: who controls the dial? “The theme of the album is power,” Maynard says, referring to the power binding our conversations, our governments, and the trembling foundation of a planet being slow-cooked in real time. “How we wield it through language and action, how society is affected by the existing power structures, the consequences of the absence of it and how we harness it emotionally and intellectually as individuals, and as the collective. Written against the backdrop of genocide in Gaza, the rise of the right, the rollback of human rights, whilst the battle for climate change rages against soaring temperatures and rising sea levels, it’s only natural that these topics are absorbed into the themes of the album.”
And you can hear it: every track wired with that pressure, letting off steam in bursts. The band cite that magic zone between 1977 and ’82 as inspiration, but they splinter it into their own asymmetric ritual: motorik throb, no wave racket, basslines that step into the room shoulder-first, and a devotion to 70s dance records that keeps everything limber rather than nostalgic.
Executive Function twitches like someone pacing a too-small apartment at 3AM. Anxiety bottled inside angular guitar stabs and synth lines pitching sideways. Maynard’s monotone delivery feels like dispatches from a fraying nervous system. Every piece of the arrangement moves with precision and impatience—like the song’s trying to outrun itself. Symptom Check is another tightened spring, but this one slips into strange shapes. Picture early Genesis stuck in a basement with X, both trying to translate disco into hieroglyphs. There’s a warped funhouse vibe—bright lights refracted through a cracked lens.
In Context Is Everything, the Moog rises like a waking creature and then Maynard lands on top of it, dead calm and razor-focused. The track struts forward on that moreish disco beat, guitar curling around the edges, bassline driving like it’s late for curfew. “Context Is Everything is an ode to the confusion of the modern world and the idea of ‘context collapse,’” she explains. “The world we live in moves at a frantic pace and often there is no time to gather context. Communication and language has always been a tool of power to twist and manipulate information but even more so in these current times where politicians and oligarchs seek to control global narratives to suit their agendas . By the time news reaches you , it may arrive with little or any of its original context. What is printed, what is omitted makes a difference, language matters and context is everything. The title of the album refers to the way that perspective plays a vital role in how we view everything, the world around us. Thinking of multiple perspectives allows us to see life through a more humanist lens.”
Soft Touch is a pressure cooker disguised as a dance-floor heater. The track hits like a shaking finger finally slamming down on the table. “Thematically, Soft Touch deals with the ongoing dilemma of learning to say no in a time where systems want us to behave in certain compliant manner…” James Beck explains, and the tension rattles every bar.
Maynard sharpens the point: “More and more we’re watching our governments take weak stances or no stance on huge issues: whether it’s the genocide in Gaza, establishing a meaningful emissions target or the rising violence against women in this country… Soft Touch is a relentless dance floor banger… Lives are at stake, temperatures rise and we need to draw hard lines for change, yet often we’re content to sit on the fence, to be a push over – to be a ‘soft touch.”
Next comes Drip Feeding, a Devo-by-way-of-Killing Joke tremour. Time signatures zigzag, synths chirp like malfunctioning lab equipment, and the whole thing feels like someone wired panic attacks to a drum machine. The Wear and Tear of Living features industrial textures, relentless percussion, and vocals sharp enough to leave marks. The Siouxsie-like drum patterns make everything feel ritualistic, like you’re witnessing a ceremony you weren’t meant to see. Upstream is a breather, but not a balm. The vocals warm, drifting through strange alien synth shapes. You can practically feel the room temperature drop a few degrees.
Telepathic Apathy has a bassline steady as a metronome, synths glowing like 80s console lights, and Maynard croons as though singing from somewhere an inch outside her own body. Solid Facts is fast, fractured, deliriously direct. Psychedelic guitar shreds across yelping vocals, everything shaking loose from the center. Permanence opens with a UFO whirr, then locks into a motorik pace that never lets up. Feels like a forgotten European art-punk 12” accidentally left on 72 RPM: too fast, too bright, electrifying.
Listen to Three Lens Approach below and order the album here.
Three Lens Approach moves like a warning flare shot across a collapsing horizon. No sermons, no tidy moral. Just five musicians channeling the world’s pressure cooker into something that kicks, sweats, trembles, and insists on being felt. screensaver aren’t documenting the chaos…they’re swallowed up in it, transmitting whatever they can before the signal cuts. If you want anything expanded, louder, meaner, or more chaotic, just say the word.
On Three Lens Approach, screensaver reach a new of level of confidence in expanding the sonic world they have built on their first LPs, Expressions of Interest (Upset the Rhythm) and Decent Shapes (Poison City Records/Upset the Rhythm).
Tour Dates (Tickets here)
- Friday 21 November – The Dart and Marlin, Warrnambool + High Angle Beams
- Saturday 22 November – The Hotel Metro, Adelaide + Placement, Hägöl, White Columns
- Friday 28 November – The Croatian Club, Newcastle + Laura Panic, The Pee Wee 50’s, Sheena Dali’s Swedish Magazines
- Saturday 29 November – Waywards, Sydney + Enclave, Boiling Hot Politician, Arditi Daggers
- Sunday 30 November – Dissent Cafe, Canberra + Evadell, Nuta Mantis
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