It’s not a secret that there’s a weird amount of overlap between the remnants of the hyperpop movement and the resurgence of the punk movement in recent years. Despite being incredibly different from a sound perspective, there’s a lot of the same emotional sentiments in its counter-culture core that has lead of lot of artists to migrate from the former to the latter as the movement cooled down a bit. I grew up around my mother listening to Greenday’s greatest hits, so while I’ve never had a deep investment in the punk scene I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for it. With all that preamble out of the way I do want to explore the idea of what happens when these two worlds meet in a way that blends the experimentation of hyperpops sound design with the intensely belted vocals of the punk scene.

abscond is an artist who has built an entire sound around making these two worlds meet in a gorgeous pairing of square wave synths, distorted guitars, and top tier vocal delivery, and lexington station *was (at the time of starting this article) the latest addition to their catalog. It’s a song that’s quickly gained priority status in my playlist, and a lot of that falls to the fact that it so carefully maintains a balance of modern production experimentation and good old angst. It comes out the gate with a very strong impression with it’s complex lead melody, and if you were to only listen to the first minute of the song you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking this is “just” another pretty damn good post-hyperpop banger with it’s distorted chorus bass and clean vocal mix. I cannot understate how well it does this baseline material, because even had it not been laying the foundation to something even crazier it would still be a phenomenal track worthy of a playlist spot. With all that said, one minute and seventeen seconds in we are delivered a fusion of styles resulting in one of the hardest modern electronic-pop drops to ever do it.

This is the moment abscond really flexes his “vocal muscles” if you will. The amount of vocal control over this intense belted chorus is something anyone who knows anything about making music will look at in awe. These are screamed punk vocals on par with those of some of the biggest names in punk from the early 2000s, and they’re juxtaposed against a top tier fuzz-distorted bass. It’s raw, it’s powerful, it’s incredibly emotionally expressive. It’s moments like this in music that I live for. The moments I do not see coming at all, but absolutely fall in love with the moment they hit. The vocals and instrumental perfectly accent each other into this phenomenal package, and the best part is there’s a whole 2 additional minutes of this song to bask in from this moment. So many songs would save their “full send” to act as a third chorus climax, but abscond takes this opportunity to raise the entire song to a new level.

To be completely honest, I’m blanking on how I want to wrap up this article and what I want to tell you. I think there’s probably a lesson here about allowing your interests to meet because they may create something new and insane, but past that I’m honestly still in that phase of being in awe at how good this song is. I only write about songs that I genuinely like, but I don’t always have the privilege of writing about songs that I absolutely love, and today is one of those lucky days that are usually reserved for new han.irl<3 releases. So bravo abscond, you really nailed it.

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*editors note: while editing the video counterpart to this article I discovered there’s a new abscond EP on Apple Music that has not yet hit Spotify thanks to what I assume is fun distribution quirks, but I felt like it really deserved a mention because I would feel terrible to highlight this without mentioning the newest drop especially when its as good at it is. So go checkout light drinker wherever it’s available.