Returning after an extensive tour earlier this year, in which they opened for Sacred Bones labelmates Molchat Doma, Los Angeles duo Sextile are back on tour to headline a bill at Seattle's The Crocodile. Like much of this current electro and wave-inspired scene, theirs is a style looking back to a bandwidth of music within the goth, synthwave, electro-industrial and early EBM sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. Where Sextile distinguish themselves is in their bridge both the original electro-industrial and EBM sound of that era, along with that of modern raved-up breakcore and jungle rhythms, and the new synth and darkwave revivals that are occurring concurrently. On the two recent albums "Push", and this year's "Yes, Please", their specific amalgamation of these genres is then held together with the adhesive qualities of punk attitude, and matched with an anthemic, lyrical defiance. Yet there is a shared affinity with this new set of darkwave acts which most clearly define their genre and cultural alignment. Inspired by the original wave and post-punk bands of the 1980s, and the balancing act of their particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak, a new generation of producers have come to the fore. These have been presented in an ideal introduction by The Guardian in their, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, Xeno & Oaklander, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Lebanon Hanover, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. Sextile move closely within these same affinities, with variables of their own, sharing an additional razor-sharp electronic and rhythmic edge with such acts as Machine Girl, Pixel Grip, and the defiant electro-industrial noise pop of fellow Los Angeles duo, Youth Code.
