Autobahn - Autobahn 1

Tight, jarring, and urgent, with most songs clocking in under four minutes, the self-titled EP from Leeds-based band Autobahn is basement music, with every number a dark gem. What makes them unsettling is their intense focus on the corporeal body – all of the titles scrutinise the subject with violent bodily transgressions.

Opening track ‘Seizure’ works its way under the skin quickly and caustically, led by screeching guitars and unmerciful drumming. A crushing dirge greeted with turbulent motions of feedback, its black stomp sets the intensity bleeding into the red. Darkness descends more ominously with ‘Force Fed’, with Craig Johnson’s switching between baritone vocals and baiting yowls, driven by bass and nail-down-the-blackboard guitars - it’s particularly taunting and unearthly, one to satisfy the gap between punk and goth rock, and lyrically sharp with a macabre humour. The dark motifs of the release permeate into closer ‘Lost Tongue’, with refractions of light pouring out of the guitar riffs. It somewhat softens the tone of the EP, but there’s still that sense of despair and false optimism in the lyrics.

Thereafter, there is no easy listening on ‘Autobahn’. Their catharsis is key, and the speedy and lacerating delivery Autobahn play with is unapologetic (they probably wouldn’t give you an apology if you asked). A dark, unwelcoming record, the vitality of its directness and its bloody-minded exhibition of a different world makes it a highly promising – and still highly unsettling – debut.