La Vie Sauvage, with and without long-term collaborator Pet Snake, has been stalking my subconscious since 2023’s ‘Fuck Myself Up’. Its contortions of shoegaze got perverted by electroclash and rave, its sultry violence kicked tough, sweet and tender. And since then and through subsequent releases, we’ve moved from the industrial minimalism of ‘Catharsis’ to the gothic drum and bass trance of ‘Dance with the Wolves’ with decades of EDM tradition in between.    

So here we land on their newest EP. It’s dark both in title and want as it plays to our alt-human states. From the slow starting pistol of ‘Hang on to Me’, we’re in a dayglo apocalypse of sub-bass repetitions and hammered out percussion that break out into hi-kicking synths. But the biggest feature here is the space. Beneath the very human vocals and between burnt beats and blunt electro, there’s a stillness that runs through the track. It’s this stillness that keeps the track ominous, as if a danger lurks just out of earshot.

Any sense of still turns frantic in ‘Unhappy’, where vocals get glitched up and fevers rise a little higher, and the spirits of first wave electroclash get summoned up from some dirty neon-noir basement. Imagine Heartsrevolution or late Crystal Castles with a new flourish of shine and production, and you’d get someplace close to the sinister heat that gets pushed and forced harder in ‘Ecstasy’.

If there’s a peak to the bell curve of this EP’s rush and energy then ‘Ecstasy’ is the meanest of highpoints; the unhappiest of hardcores and with a bleak EDM backbone and enough savage grind to remind us of that sweet violent noise made of rave punch and shoegaze that penetrated ‘Fuck Myself Up’. Fuelled by stuttering rhythms and hard shards of sound, the song flies by in far too short an instant that begs another play the moment it’s over.

But as the bell curve tilts down, we return where to we started, to the DNA of the opening track. Though this time, in ‘It’s Real’, there’s something perilously and dangerously close to an optimism. Hell, there’s even passages that pass off as pop. Vocals are unadulterated with their phrasings left intact, percussion, though produced with a shimmer, lead us to cleaner and less electrodirt destinations. And while it’s fine contrast to the sounds of the songs that came before in their quick blasts of sinister and blister, there’s just a hint of a premature ending. If this EP is a test and a tease of just-scratched harder and darker to come, then more please! And if not, play it again and play it louder.