In the hyperkinetic vortex of modern electronic music’s ever-subdividing taxonomy, Years of Denial remain obstinately uncategorizable. The French-Czech duo’s latest, Love Cuts EP, is both an interstitial passage between 2023’s Suicide Disco 2 and the forthcoming third instalment and an autonomous exercise in mapping love’s most labyrinthine territories. Here, love is refracted through a prismatic lens that captures its digital phantoms, forbidden geometries, toxic sublimations, and unvarnished eroticism with each facet rendered in the duo’s uncompromising sonic language. On October 4, this vernacular will be spoken on stage as part of Control Club's 17th anniversary.
Jerome Tcherneyan’s production and Barkosina Hanusova’s gravitas have, across nearly a decade, coalesced into something approaching alchemy. Their part ritualistic improvisation, part calculated architectural precision methodology manifests here as six tracks that pulse with suspended entropy. This is a blend of death rock, future goth, EBM, and rave that finds the project’s poetic and powerful lyrics fusing with motorized beats and 4/4 rhythms.
“Devil in a Skirt” opens the EP and establishes its thematic throughline through a death-rock narrative. This serpentine menace unfolds like the character arc of a film noir femme fatale, both seduction and warning. Underscored by Hanusova’s vocals, its pulse is delivered with the kind of theatrical precision of a vocoderized Marlene Dietrich.
“Affaire de Coeur” and “Hide & Sick” complement each other in what could be the EP’s central diptych. The former delivers body-fuelled stabs and an austere forward thrust that elegantly bleeds into the latter, a higher-energy cut designed to scorch the floor. Here, Years of Denial demonstrate their mastery in constructing passages that breathe and contract with the physiological rhythms of arousal itself.
“We Are the Party” delivers the kind of floor-filling imperative its title promises while maintaining the project’s commitment to concept. The track operates as both celebration and critique of club culture’s hedonistic mythology. Its mantra attains the hypnotic intensity needed to transform sweat into a sacrament. Discipline and delirium are held in careful balance, bending the grid without breaking it.
The EP’s penultimate moment, “In Your Bed,” is also its most audacious gambit. Drenched in acid rave, its corrosive 303 recalls the synaesthetic overload of Underworld. Yet, Hanusova’s interventions prevent any appropriating capitulation to 90s nostalgic euphoria. Here, the bedroom is an arena for psychological warfare conducted through sub-bass pressure and the flicker of curated desire.
Closing with “AI Lover” as both a dystopian prophecy and an inadvertent manifesto for our current tech-fueled epoch. Its future-goth surge interrogates our relationship with artificial intelligence. But Years of Denial resist lazy technophobia. Instead, they acknowledge the allure of algorithmic companionship alongside its more problematic side streets. The result feels like stumbling upon Kraftwerk, while endlessly doomscrolling between Tinder and Reddit.
In this moment of algorithmic reproduction, Years of Denial’s commitment to uncategorization feels radical. Love Cuts is, therefore, an argument in art’s ability to illuminate the dark corners of human experience without any false consolation; imagine David Lynch and Gesaffelstein coming together to soundtrack the alternative multiverses of late-stage capitalism.
The EP succeeds because Years of Denial holds the maturity to approach these subjects with the seriousness they demand and the chance to dance our way toward understanding through a courageously complex confrontation.
