I neglected to mention it last week, but the sudden death of Bruno Kramm of Das Ich after a gig in Spain was really quite shocking. Das Ich weren’t by any stretch a gateway band for me, although I did own a few records and had seen them live once, and they were a fascinating, theatrical band that sounded quite unlike their peers.
But it also does highlight that many of the artists we love are getting older, much as we are, and we’ve already lost a number. See that band you love in a live environment while you still have the chance. You may not get another.
/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.
/Subject /Tracks of the Month
/Playlists 
/Deezer / 
/YouTube
/Related /649/Tracks/Aug-26 /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Details /Tracks this week/10 /Tracks on Deezer Playlist/10 /Duration/41:00
Onto this week: I’m now into the final six months of /amodelofcontrol.com, and a regular monthly task on this site for nearly two decades has been to wrap up the best tracks of the past month, and now we’re into October, it’s that time again.
A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.
Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details above).
/Track of the Month
/Dismantled
/Zero
/Endless
I’m not gonna lie: five years on from the initial teaser for Endless, I had rather resigned myself to the fact that return of Dismantled was never going to happen after all. So colour me very surprised indeed when Zero finally dropped, and a swift follow-up announcement that the long, long awaited album was coming too in November.
The first Dismantled album (in 2002!!!) blew a great many minds when it arrived: a dense, sample-heavy electro-industrial album that had human emotion and a great many feelings among some incredible sound design. Sure, it owed an awful lot to Front Line Assembly, but we could live with that. Following albums perhaps drifted a bit, with a brighter, almost poppy sound at points that I was never truly loved in the same way.
So I hit play on Zero with a tiny bit of trepidation. There’s a few samples that are very familiar indeed (one also opens one of FLA’s greatest tracks, Plasticity, even if I can’t recall where it is originally from, and another is an iconic moment in Alien³), but the rest of the song is Gary Zon striking a neat balance between early Dismantled and his later work, at last. It is precise, elegant and frankly a quite wonderful return that reminds just how extraordinary a producer he is.
/Morphine
/Cocoon
/Cocoon
I did think the sudden uptick in activity from the official Morphine social media pages was unusual: announced on 24-September, on what would have been Mark Sandman’s 74th birthday, was an album of previously unfinished/unreleased songs from the band’s last couple of years before Sandman died onstage, with new saxophone work by Dana Colley. Immediately, hearing the distinctive sound of Morphine again is a fucking joy, frankly, even if the song is dark and laid-back: a song about the small joy of being home, insulated from the outside world and being able to kick back and enjoy life’s simple pleasures.
Morphine were never like other bands: a dark, jazzy element dominated their songs, not to mention the deep low-end from Sandman’s baritone voice, two-string bass and Colley’s virtuoso saxophone work. Hopefully this new(ish) material might find a new generation of fans – they have a fascinating world to discover.
/Mogwai
/Underground (feat. Iggy Pop)
/Happy Tears
The mighty Mogwai mark their thirtieth anniversary as an active band this year, and it can never be said that the band have stuck in their lane as a “post rock” band. Mostly gone from recorded material these days is the terrorising volume and guitar overload of their best-known work, although that’s not to say that they don’t bare their teeth now and again. This new single – featuring none other than Stuart Braithwaite’s hero Iggy Pop, who they of course sampled on second album Come On Die Young – is a rolling, relatively uptempo track for the band that sees Iggy growling through a story from the point of view of a sentient robot who wants to fuck and love rock music. As you do.
The upcoming album is a two-CD overview of their career, including a new, orchestral version of New Paths to Helicon, and opens and closes as it should – with Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home at one end, and Mogwai Fear Satan at the other. It’s been a fascinating, enthralling ride and long may it remain so.
/Ganser
/Futuretripping
Fresh from their first European/UK live dates, we have a new single from Chicago band Ganser (a band I’ve long championed on this site). If you’re familiar with their tense, tight sound, musically this song won’t surprise particularly, but what is interesting is the theme of the lyrics. Many of their songs are insular and cryptic lyrically, but this song seems to open up a bit, as it appears to be a song about trying to navigate a chaotic world in 2026, one where disinformation is now a mainstream tactic, and egos and wealth gain you control and power.
And on first watch of the video, at least I now know what the various Go-Pros onstage at their recent London show were for…
/Lambrini Girls
/Bang Bang Bang
/No Refunds
The sneering Brighton punk duo Lambrini Girls are back, although with what they’ve been through recently you could be forgiven for thinking that no-one would have minded if they took a longer break. But such is the world of the music industry, i guess.
Apparently this rampaging two-minute blast is about “a man revered by some as Christ, and others as the devil”, and like all the best Lambrini Girls tracks, it is fuelled by Phoebe Lunny’s searing vocal delivery and that feeling that they are getting everything out in their songs before they run out of time. Unashamedly political and encouraging activism, in many ways they feel like the way music should be going – speaking out, helping to force change and giving others a voice. The fact that their music also gives an endorphin rush that makes it fun too makes it even better.
/CHVRCHES
/Roses
In the five years since CHVRCHES last released an album, they toured the world, took on all comers, it felt, and during a period of hiatus, lead singer Lauren Mayberry released an excellent solo album Vicious Creature that felt a little overlooked.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the band began teasing their return over the past month, excitement grew. My initial take on Roses, though, is that perhaps I’m a bit underwhelmed. The gloomy, Cure-esque feel to the song feels like a direct continuation to elements of Screen Violence, and everything else in the song feels a little understated: CHVRCHES were always at their best with giant hooks and Mayberry’s razor-sharp delivery: here we get interpolations of nursery rhymes and a quasi-rapped bridge. Maybe the song will make more sense when the album comes, presumably in 2027…
/Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
/This Machine
/Industrial Growth
Gordon Chapman-Fox’s work under this name has been perhaps one of the surprise breakthroughs in the past decade: after all, who expected a mostly-ambient (I long since dubbed it “brutalist ambient”) electronic project preoccupied with the hope, partial failure and social consequences of British post-war new towns, to catch on in the way it has? Perhaps part of that is down to the laser-like focus of the themes, and the clever way he interpolates samples from the era and also films from the same period.
The new album, though, seems to have taken the darker turn he’s been hinting at for a while. The rhythms and echoes of industry – mostly now silenced through closures and relocation – appear to be the core of the new album, and presumably a comment on the economic devastation that results in new towns like Warrington and Runcorn when the primary employers no longer exist. This Machine, the first track from the album, has beats that hit with calculated precision, but they are slower and less ordered than a factory that is still functioning: this one is slowing down as it is shut down for good.
/Decliner
/$5.99 Special
/Cut Rate
A discovery that I can thank my friend Marc Church for is this Detroit band, the latest in a new generation of bands that seem to be blurring the lines considerably between industrial and post-punk. The opening track from the album is a glowering track that seems to be in perpetual darkness, led by a stately stomp of a rhythm, chiming, treated guitars and glitchy electronics. The vocals are in a different world, an unhinged delivery that appears to suggest the actions of an unrepentant man – if the video is to be believed, it could involve Baseball. Either way, it is an impressive opener to an album that’s well worth a listen.
/synapscape
/to the stars
/the future
synapscape, the pairing of Philipp Münch and Tim Kniep, are one of the standout acts on ant-zen and for over twenty-five years, have been a curiosity not in their use of vocals amid their experimental industrial-noise stylings, but also by their way of never having needed to take things to extremities. Their latest album has a lot to say amid the dense sound structures, but there’s also a hint of optimism in the press release for it: “…humanity finally understood that the future was not something to wait for, but something it had the power to create.“.
It is fitting, then, that one of the standout tracks to these ears on the album is called to the stars. Multiple rhythm patterns jostle for space with Tim Kniep’s vocals for a track that sounds wholly unlike anything else out there at the moment, the highlight of a surprisingly listenable and hugely enjoyable release.
/The Cassandra Complex
/Moscow Idaho (GCSX Version)
/Generating Station Complex
Cx are marking their fortieth anniversary with an album of older favourites completely re-recorded with 2026 kit, and it must be said that a number of the songs here have gained new life as a result. Not all of them have had much done to them, mind: particularly the opening track, my longtime favourite Cx song: Moscow Idaho. As it always has been, it is a three-minute technopunk blast that doesn’t let up for a second, and all that has happened with the new recording is to make it that bit louder and more powerful. And that’s fine by me: I’d have been much less happy if they’d changed the structure of this still-fantastic song!