Imagine Billy Idol is cryogenically frozen in a chrome sarcophagus beneath Camden Market sometime around 1987. Then, decades later, he’s thawed out in 2014 by accident during the recording of No Fixed Address, a.k.a. the Nickelback album where they briefly flirted with electronic music and accidentally made a synth-rock soundtrack for the apocalypse and ended up with that one song that goes funky and somewhat viral on Tiktok. Anyways, Billy Idol stumbles out, snarls something about surveillance capitalism, grabs a mic, and the band, because they’re Canadian and polite, just sort of let him roll with it.
The result of that would sound something like WELCOME TO THE FUTURE, a five-track EP that sounds like Rebel Yell got stuck in an Alexa feedback loop and decided it was into it. It crashes into your ears like a leather-clad freight train, covered in LED strips, hauling nothing but fog machines, leftover eyeliner, and a deep distrust of modernity. It’s bombastic. It’s got a theme. And it absolutely rules.
The riffs on this project are thick. Not “classic rock thick,” but more “your computer fan starts screaming when the chorus hits” thick. The vocals are pure Idol: bratty, snarling, and weirdly theatrical, like he’s about to challenge you to a knife fight and a dance-off. And the drums? The drums are so precisely engineered they feel less like percussion and more like industrial machinery having an emotional breakthrough. It’s dancefloor swagger duct-taped to stadium grit, shot through a lens of post-grunge cynicism. It shouldn’t work. It really shouldn’t. And yet, like an off-brand cyberpunk musical directed by a former nu-metal producer, it slaps.
Highlights include the title track, which struts into frame like a leather trench coat preaching technobabble, in the best way imaginable. It’s sleazy, anthemic, and somehow both ironic and deadly sincere. It’s campy, but heartfelt, like an emotional LED glow strip. There’s also Screen Maniac, which sounds like the biggest vamper of your local theater production fronting a Passion Pit cover band, and the result had me smiling ear to ear.
But this EP isn’t just an audio assault; it’s also a whole audiovisual project. Five music videos, filmed across South America and Europe, are being released monthly on the in front of me YouTube channel. This makes WELCOME TO THE FUTURE not just a music release, but also a sort of transcontinental multimedia thesis on the aesthetics of tech-anxiety rock. You’ve got to love the ambition and the passion for the craft on display.
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE is chaotic, over-the-top, and endlessly charming. It’s a genre-bending lovechild of eyeliner-era ego and denim-clad radio rock, and it knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you’ve got a soft spot for gloss and camp, you’re gonna love this.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
