Many fans of the more aggressive forms of electronic music, such as our beloved D&B, industrial, hardcore and dubstep, migrated to said genres from punk, post punk and alternative rock. Looking at The Prodigy in the 90s, it’s pretty easy to see this lineage, but as EDM has started mixing with pop, and got farther away from punk on the radio dial, it’s not often one finds a healthy swirl of the two, with a few exceptions such as Rammstein or Nine Inch Nails. Enter: Mother Ghost and their forthcoming album, Radio Fantasma.
Based in Houston Texas, Mother Ghost are a duo comprised of brothers Oscar and Thomas Flores who began putting together their loud, industrial-tinged and feedback-driven post punk electronica in 2014 with their first EP, Rivers. Back then, the influence early post punk bands like Joy Division and Bauhaus had on the brothers was quite clear, as the EP got stuck in to the gothiness of it all. Those more modern synths were there even then, however, and through Mother Ghost’s next few releases, they cultivated that sound more and more. It must have been a challenging process, to keep the raw emotion and chaos of post punk whilst honing their production craft.
Now with another EP, a full album, some decidedly EDM remixes and a ‘split album’ with fellow experimental post punkers Mind Mine, it seems Mother Ghost have their unique style well and truly honed as they get ready to drop Radio Fantasma. The teaser track, ‘Negative Affirmations’, has so much going on to express the turbulence of Oscar’s decidedly punk vocals, but it’s all woven seamlessly together: the afore-mentioned screamed vox, the industrial-style breakbeat that’s almost fast enough to be drum & bass, and Thomas’s decidedly Peter Hook-like bass playing set the scene for what promises to be a dense, angry and unique album. With extra production from aCr of Geodesic Records, the chaos and madness of post punk is revived in this one track. It bodes very well for the rest of the album if ‘Negative Affirmations’ is just meant to tease it.
When it comes to post punk, the intermingling of electronic and rock elements has washed out so much in recent years that it can be hard to remember that many of the genre’s progenitors worked heavily with synths and other electronic elements. Luckily, Mother Ghost are here to bring that all screaming back with their own twist on a favourite genre of many a raver in the present.
Radio Fantasma releases on Geodesic Records on 20th July and will be available on Spotify and Bandcamp, where fans can also check out the band’s discography.