Derision Cult’s new EP, Flyover Noise, arrives like a steel-boned hymn to industry and intent; an examination of the noise between ambition and artifice. The project began in 2014 in Chicago, helmed by Dave McAnally, who later stepped back from music until a conversation with the frontman of Die Warzau reanimated his drive. What followed wasn’t a return, but a reconstruction: a band forged through reflection, precision, and the dark hum of machines.
The group’s architecture is industrial in both sound and spirit. Sean Payne, a Chicago producer steeped in the city’s electronic underground, constructs vast, synthetic geometries that seem to breathe beneath the surface. Brad Huston threads through this mechanized terrain with serrated guitars, while Jesse Hunt of Pigface commands the percussion like an engine at the edge of combustion. McAnally anchors it all: his guitars strike with the weight of intent, each riff functioning less as ornament and more as architecture. The result feels engineered rather than composed—cold metal drawn to fevered heat.
The band’s name finds its source in cultural irony. McAnally was taken by a review describing The Room as a “cult of derision,” a phrase that mirrored his own disillusionment with modern outrage economies. “Sister Machine Gun’s cold wave late Wax Trax sound looms large over our overall approach to songwriting,” he says, noting how the art of provocation has metastasized into a commercial model. In his world, mockery becomes marketing; dissent, a brand. The tension between sincerity and manipulation burns through the core of Derision Cult’s philosophy. Each track is an act of confrontation with that duality.
Flyover Noise functions as both homage and exorcism. The band revisits two Illinois acts that shaped their sonic DNA: Better Than Me by Sister Machine Gun and Rocket Science by The Goodyear Pimps. “The punk/metal sounds from bands like The Goodyear Pimps loomed large for us in high school,” McAnally reflects. The covers are not nostalgia but renewal—each one stripped and rebuilt in Derision Cult’s signature style, as if to remind the listener that influence, like machinery, can be dismantled and remade.
Listen to Flyover Noise below and order the EP here.
Since signing with Glitch Mode Recordings in 2021, the collective has expanded its reach, collaborating with figures from Nine Inch Nails, Stabbing Westward, and Cyanotic. Their industrial lineage is clear, but their ambition runs deeper. Derision Cult sounds like the din of a culture confronting its own reflection: precise, relentless, and human beneath the alloy.
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