You’re breaking through the mold.
Believe you lost control.
Disorder in your future.
Believe what you’ve been told.
Richmond, Virginia producer and vocalist Troy Hancock, under the alias The Treasury, offers a collection that feels both engineered and incantatory. Permanent District is an exercise in tension: precision meeting decay, rhythm grinding against restraint. Across its five core tracks, Hancock assembles a metallic architecture of sound that hums with an unsettling intelligence. It is music built like brutalist sculpture: functional, imposing, and strangely human.
The production, realized with engineer Yave Rust, carries the tang of machinery made sentient. Every programmed drum lands like a measured decree; every synth line advances with bureaucratic poise. Yet within this order lies unease; the sense of a system too aware of its own design. Hancock’s voice, distant and clipped, narrates from within the structure rather than above it. He does not guide so much as haunt his own creation, a presence both integral and estranged.
The opening and title track, Permanent District, feels like a philosophical dispatch from the end of modernity. Hancock writes of paranoia and paralysis, of a civilisation straining under the weight of its own design. The track’s economy of rhythm conceals a moral exhaustion: a recognition that progress has become self-cannibalising. Faith quivers in the fluorescent light…more habit than hope. Fear Austere circles around themes of belief and repetition: faith reduced to protocol, rebellion crushed beneath ritual. The words are plain but loaded, as if written for a society addicted to obedience. The rhythm moves like a factory belt, delivering each phrase with mechanical insistence. It is a track that studies submission in motion.
Novice Cycle, a study in anxiety, introduces an element of unease that borders on surrealism. Vocals hiss and fracture, as if intercepted through faulty surveillance equipment. The song’s structure feels circular, returning always to a point of erasure. One imagines a mind recording its own undoing.
X.Y.Z. (You Think You Know Me) channels the more militant energy of Front Line Assembly; rhythms that stomp rather than swing, atmospheres that feel more observed than inhabited. Its aggression is clinical, stripped of sentiment. Only endurance remains: a march through static, lit by the brief flare of recognition that even alienation can be communal.
Finally, Initialize closes the EP with a strange sense of reclamation. Here, identity dissolves in a flood of code and noise. The language of technology replaces confession; emotion becomes function. Yet in its repetition lies something almost devotional—a yearning for meaning within the mechanical. It is the sound of humanity reduced to signal, and still, somehow, persisting. Two remixes are included from Anticipation and Normal Bias at the end.
Permanent District feels less like a debut and more like an intervention. Hancock constructs a disciplined world of form and friction, one that reflects our own in miniature: efficient, faithless, and quietly aware of its own decline.
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