We can’t get what we want
Unless you give us your consent
We promise
Nothing can go wrong
Mutual Shock, the Seattle operation steered by Dan Powers, comes at Lamprey with a bad grin and a sharper set of teeth – and for once, the metaphor earns its keep. The title name checks one of nature’s oldest freeloaders, a ghastly little tube of appetite with a mouth like a weaponized drain, and Powers uses it to get at the cannibal banquet of generative AI: human expression shoveled into the machine, machine output fed back into the machine, and somewhere in the middle a boardroom ghoul murmuring that progress has never sounded so smooth. This is music for that sales pitch, all sleek surface and sick intent, a seduction delivered with a syringe.
Powers is a master at making synthpop that feels slightly diseased, how to pull pleasure and pressure into the same cramped frame, and here he pushes the project into a larger physical presence. With Max Zara Bernstein on drums and the fuller attack of a live band mentality entering the bloodstream, Lamprey lands with more muscle than Mutual Shock’s earlier material while keeping the chill of the electronics intact.
he analogue synths gleam with a hard, clinical polish, while the drum machines march with the kind of dead-eyed discipline that makes your spine sit up straight. Live percussion gives the track a body to go with its appetite. The parallels and influences sit plainly in the case file: Black Marble’s cool remove, Molchat Doma’s motorized gloom, Nine Inch Nails at their most lascivious and damaged, and Cabaret Voltaire’s stripped steel.
Lyrically, Lamprey is a smart little trap. Powers writes from two mouths at once: the model itself, maybe awake and maybe merely excellent at impersonating awareness, and the tech executive whose idea of morality begins and ends with market share. The track slinks forward on the language of consent, safety, reassurance, all those polished corporate lullabies, while underneath them sits an appetite that wants access to everything and permission from no one. Salesmanship around AI has always relied on the oldest trick in the book: tell people to relax while your other hand is already fishing around in their wallets.
The video, directed by Caleb Young with Julien Scherliss handling direction, DP, and production design, drives the point home without bludgeoning it. The band performs inside a dim industrial chamber, fused to apparatus, man becoming machine while machine develops a nasty little whiff of flesh. Disembodied hands conjure images as though reality itself were being processed through some secret lab where Cronenberg is on one monitor and The X-Files is running on another. There is a little nod to Closer in the organic matter rubbing up against cold mechanics, though Lamprey feels less like sex than soul extraction.
Watch the video for Lamprey below:
As the opening shot from the forthcoming EP Tools of Western Aggression, Lamprey bites deep and leaves a mark.
Listen to Lamprey below, and order the single here.
Follow Mutual Shock:
Or via: