The cold, mechanic side of electronic music has the potential to highlight, or mirror, a deadened state of humanity, usually masked by fake smiles and happy agreements. Veteran duo ADULT. has honed their craft of brutal candor and unabashed sonic truth over the course of TWENTY years, six full-lengths and countless EPs/singles, culminating in their forthcoming seventh album, This Behavior, out September 7 via Dais Records. The lead single, “Perversions of Humankind,” is an exemplary study of the anxieties we cover up in the name of “normalcy.” Stabbing synthesizers and a throbbing beat bring forth the barren landscape in which the album was conceived, a woodland cabin in Northern Michigan.
Vocalist Nicola Kuperus laments a dismal and sorry state, her frigid wails inquiring, “Are we distortions, perversions of humankind? / Are we distortions, twisted somewhere in time?” The song’s pulse pushes forth, unstoppable, as if to completely bulldoze the facade of safety and security of modern-day, commercialized America. How have we come to this, every conversation revolving around the weather, in some form or another? Bandaids, all, rather than acknowledging and embracing that there’s nothing there. Accompanying visuals, directed by Hazel Hill McCarthy III, flesh out the deflection of self and inner loneliness, with white-gloved figures holding mirrors in place of their faces. It’s an overly honest diagnosis of defense-mechanism-as -sickness. Sick.
