Bastard, the sophomore album from New York City’s The Wants, scorches the nervy post-punk of their 2020 debut, Container, shaping something heavier, stranger, and more volatile. It nods to acts like DNA and Television. A self-described “No Wave / No Pop techno punk” album, Bastard is machine-driven yet emotional, with grief at its core. In support of the album, The Wants bring their genre-defying sound to Control on Saturday, October 11.
Throughout, drums hit with four-on-the-floor drive, vintage EBM synths shimmer, and bass hypnotizes like trip-hop. Bastard moves like a dance record until the guitars crash in like scaffolding in a tornado. Madison Velding-VanDam sneers with PiL-era Lydon bitterness, while Jason Gates toggles between live drumming and pad artifice. It slinks somewhere between minimal wave and industrial punk, wired to the grid yet still alive.
The album opens menacingly. "Void Meets Concrete" crackles with atmosphere thick as dust in a condemned squat. Velding-VanDam delivers lines about "modified genetic countryside" and sewage with liturgical disdain. "Data Tumor" follows, and the critique turns clinical. It addresses society’s addiction to informational overload, where monetized glitch is misconstrued as self-identity. Like the unsettling reflections on technology found in Cabaret Voltaire, echoing later into the likes of "OK Computer," it’s a blue-light doom-scroll where the beat is taut, and the paranoia is tauter.
“87 Gas” may be the conceptual core of Bastard. Inspired by Wawa trips in rural Pennsylvania, it channels deadpan Americana: strip malls, gas pumps, ambient despair... These localized rhythms mirror the unsettling vastness of late-capitalist sprawl, where isolation hums beneath the neon. Like much of Bastard, it confronts a world that repeats itself instead of changing.
"Disposable Man" hints at danceability. It’s Joy Division’s "She’s Lost Control" filtered through LCD Soundsystem with a groove haunted by expendability. Vocals taunt, slip away, and disintegrate before finding direct expression through its unreliable narrator. "All Comes At Once" then detonates a swirling storm of guitar and drum, calling on Bastard’s breaking point.
From the wreckage emerges “Cruel.” Hovering with intimacy, here, grief is literal. After his father was found dead in a Michigan trailer, alone for days among detritus and pill bottles, Velding-VanDam began Bastard. The loss is palpable. Synths turn cold, and vocals are barely exhaled. It seems ashamed to be alive.
“Too Tight” snaps focus back to the body. Built on acid-house claustrophobia, it’s a club track for the under-touched. Then, “Lover Sister Mother,” a tender serenade. Disintegration-era Cure, if from Brooklyn techno squats. “Feeling Alright” offers a false sense of relief. The phrase—“I’m feeling alright”—rings hollow, ironic, and desperate. Yet it rocks with danceable nihilism.
“Explosions” lasts just two minutes, but feels like performance art in a collapsing warehouse. Then, almost gracefully, Bastard ends with “No Need”—a brooding track swelling from minimal discomfort to full-body reckoning, ending with resignation sharpened into clarity.
Bastard finds The Wants using post-punk and industrial techno not as fetish but as scaffolding for existential exposure. Recorded mostly live in five days at Tarquin Studios—where Interpol made Antics, though Bastard is far dirtier—it captures chaos and control in high fidelity. There are echoes of PiL’s Metal Box, Throbbing Gristle’s confrontation-as-form, and the brutalism of peers like Model/Actriz. This is an album for when identity is a glitch. So, where does that leave us? The question’s still there: how the fuck do you dance with this bastard world?”
