If I look east after dark there’s a steelworks that looks almost exactly how this album sounds. Black steel with blue flames, a mass of metal and creaking concrete, heavy punctured by bight neon lights. There’s a romance in its dirt and its dust. Those flames and furnaces burn and leave a stain on the sky, and that image is ‘Last Wars’ new album.

I can’t lie to you, I’ve been looking forward to it. I’ve known it’s been in the works and been simmering in pressure over an unpleasantly lengthy gestation. But it’s here and it’s landed, with its seductive post punk nihilism and it’s rarely less than frantic furore. I’ve played it on car stereos, I’ve played it at home. It even graced a church hall PA. All I can say is the more intimate the better, give its rush room to overtake and sear in.  

‘Attrition’ is the sum of a myriad of ideas all burnt down to a crisp with a negligent sci-fi brevity. So compact are the sounds and the hits of impatience that it fits every post-apocalyptic film in one trailer. A trailer of 2 mins. 42. ‘Ages’ is a slow burn of wide 80’s bass with the ribs of the strings pealing outwards. All that post punk of old has been faithfully revived in a rust bath of Trent Reznor percussion.     

But it’s the second half volley of noise, fire and flame that most snatch and claw at the grabbables. From ‘Crystalline’ onwards, though the pace hardly falters, all the rushes of sound find a place. The energy is spread out in thick treacle measures giving each swell at least room to hyper ventilate. The hushed vocals shift from centre to background, glowing pads underpin or slip forwards, the scrawliest of guitars either make themselves known or form the most 4AD felt of distortion. In this second half there’s space in the breathlessness and the restless is truly earned and embedded.  We’ve penetrated the style. Here’s the substance. And ‘Last City’ is the sonic of a world burning up, with the romance of those steelworks at dawn.

There aint a pause to be found in the album, mixed and produced without time between songs for engagement with any sense of quiet or recovery. So the only choice is swallow it whole.

It’s not easy. It aint comfortable, but when you tear apart the tangle of one hundred ideas at once and let the taste of the pace settle in… it’s a short, fast and sharp album that feels longer when it’s gone as you remember the songs hook by hook.     

Out now on download, CD and on deep blue sweet vinyl.