The Drum Machine at the End of Everything

Dan Boeckner’s voice always sounds like it’s operating at maximum structural load—not quite breaking but straining at the exact limit of what conviction can hold together. Handsome Furs made records that felt like transmissions from somewhere east of everywhere: drum machines, cheap synths, and Boeckner and Alexei Perry building music that romanticized industrial decay and late-night drives through cities you’d never actually visit. "What About Us" arrives with that same urgency intact—a love song wearing a protest song’s clothes, or maybe the other way around. With them, the ambiguity was always the whole point.