Bare it all
Nitrate film
Burned at the stake
Reaganomics swims in its wake
Chicago post-punk trio Body Shop comes barreling out of the city with the kind of record that makes you want to knock over a barstool just to hear how it sounds hitting the floor in time with the rhythm. And that is the rhythm they answer to: their own, a twitching pulse no one else could have set, carving out a singular identity that defies modern post-punk convention and landing closer to the lean, lived-in nerve of the Reagan-Thatcher years than most of the genre’s current revivalists usually dare. And their new EP, Sex Body, has nerve, swaggering hips, and a wicked little grin smeared across its face, and it understands a principle too many bands have misplaced in the museum gift shop of post-punk history: if you want to say something about the modern condition, sometimes the smartest route is to make people move first and think about why they’re moving two minutes later.
The first track Repulsion kicks the door open with a bassline stretched tight as piano wire, all bad intent and bright mischief, while Kit Dee delivers those spoken vocals with a cool, cutting edge that calls up Kim Gordon, like she wandered into a warehouse party and decided to start reading the room its rights. The track bounces, jerks, then suddenly drops into a busted little no-wave detour that feels gloriously crooked. It’s funny, slightly nasty, and far smarter than it initially lets on. A visceral outpouring of disgust and fury, the song catalogues rejection of social norms and simmering hatred toward others. Violent imagery mirrors emotional overload, yet beneath the revulsion, an unstoppable rhythm persists, that beat locking in like a bad habit you’re not ready to quit.
Then the title track Sex Body struts in on a bass groove that knows exactly how much trouble it can cause without ever raising its voice. Around it, the synths zip and veer with caffeinated panic, and the band lands in that delicious zone where club music, art-school absurdity, and plain old lust get tangled together. You can hear the ghost of ZE Records hanging around the edges, maybe Suburban Lawns peeking through the curtains, too. They sound like people living in this century’s digital fever swamp, where desire gets tagged, sorted, sold back, and somehow still manages to come off hot, strange, and gloriously unstable. This track fuses sexuality with digital imagery, portraying the body as both machine and commodity, where intimacy gets processed into data and sent back out as something colder, shinier, harder to trust.
Next is Limits, which enters as a rally cry shouted from the top of a crumbling office tower, all catchy chant and joyous commotion, with a whipped-up energy that nods toward the B-52s at their most gloriously unbuttoned. There’s a bite under the bass-driven bounce, though, a sense of people being pushed, prodded, polished down to something usable. A critique of power, control, and exploitation, the song explores endurance under pressure, particularly through gendered expectations, in which repetition feels like a ritual and a warning rolled into one.
Fallacies starts with sirens and a stalking bass figure before slipping into a chant that feels half public breakdown, half downtown poetry slam. A chaotic collage of orange, tan, and technicolor-tinged celluloid cultural references, Fallacies dissects media, ideology, and excess through a distorted lens of the 1970s. It spits out images of spectacle and absurdity with a grin that feels a little too wide, like it knows the joke and you’re still catching up.
Then Exit Drill lurches into view, all angular guitar chatter and clipped funk, its odd little call-and-response figures rubbing against an airy chorus. Driven by stark architectural imagery, Exit Drill calls for an end to destruction and the reinvention of rigid systems. The urgency keeps building, like alarms going off in a building nobody bothered to evacuate, until the idea of tearing it all down starts to sound less like chaos and more like common sense.
Listen to Sex Body below and order the EP here.
Throughout their EP Sex Body, Body Shop makes chaos feel tightly coiled, purposeful, and perversely danceable. Tyler Ommen and Doug Malone keep the production lean and lively, and Mikey Young’s mastering gives the songs a hard, clean outline without sanding off their weird edges. Body Shop sound alert, amused, and fully alive to the absurdity closing in from every side. This record grabs your wrist, drags you onto the floor, and leaves you there laughing at the panic of living in the modern age.
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