Youth Code is one of most exciting duos in heavy industrial music not named Nine Inch Nails. When they took a break their future seemed uncertain. I can report wholeheartedly that upon their return their future, at least musicall remains as bleak as ever.
While not as chaotic and frantic as their previous releases Yours, With Malice dials down the tempo and ups the creep factor. This is a snarling, insidious beast of an e.p that bares its fangs with intent to bite hard.
No Consequence sounds like prime Ministry, as it bursts forth from your speakers like an angry alien with its eyes squarely set on your jugular. Sara Taylor sounds as incensed and as full of bile as she ever has. It’s a hell of a way to reintroduce yourself to people.
Wishing Well is surprisingly accessible with its throbbing synthy beats bubbling under the more angular and jagged industrial elements. This is a close to Youth Code get to writing a pop song, even if it is something on the more nightmarish end of the spectrum.
In Search of Tomorrow is a glitched out looping assault on the senses that wants you to dance as much as it wants to pound your head in. It harkens back to the work on their previous full-length 2016’s Commitment to Complications and acts as a bridge between what they are doing now and what has come before.
Make Sense is as steely cold as a handshake from a Terminator and feels just as traumatic. A dark, grinding warped track that sounds as artificial as the machines used to make it, before completely losing its mind halfway through and becoming a propulsive and desperate behemoth as Sara’s screams of “Make it all Make Sense” become more and more anguished. A genuinely unnerving stand out moment.
I’m Sorry sounds like the most stressful final boss video game music you have ever heard in your life. It’s unrelenting, unsettling and feels like it just won’t stop any time soon while doing wonders for your heart rate and anxiety levels in equal measure. It’s a hell of a way to close the e.p. One that will leave you stressed out and struggling to gather your thoughts.
Youth Code has come back from hiatus seemingly more angry, more off the wall and somehow more explosive than they were previously. Time away has done absolutely nothing to dull their edge at all, if anything it’s made them a sharper unit. Yours, With Malice is a very aptly titled return from a duo who are perhaps now more than ever dead set on kicking the world’s teeth in.
