'Surveillance Culture' is the sixth studio album by Swedish electro punk powerhouse
. It's also their most daring and confident LP yet, combining retrofuturistic electronics, crisp danceable beats and assertive vocals that are more upfront than ever before.
Asked about the impetus for the departure from their earlier heavily distorted industrial sound, the band is adamant that less is more: "We simply felt it was time to strip away some layers, to try and create maximum impact from a minimum of audio tracks. This is probably the catchiest and most listenable TPM has ever been, but it's entirely on our own terms. We've also returned to some of our older influences, everything from stuff like early
Human League and
Killing Joke to
Acid House and
New Beat. In general, we're really into the whole post-punk aesthetic and we tried to reflect that in the packaging. In terms of production, we wanted to keep the jagged edges and some of the human imperfections - there are already enough people out there doing meticulously polished electronic music. Someone described us as a garage band with synths instead of guitars, which is about as good as it gets in our book!" 'Surveillance Culture' is the first TPM album on the Complete Control Productions label: "It's fantastic to finally be able to work with like-minded people and we have a lot of promising things up our sleeves. We're heavily involved with the label and it's definitely a long term commitment on our part. Watch out for lots more mayhem later in 2011!"
Having experimented with samplers, synths and drum machines since the late 1980's,
Anders Karlsson released his first work as
The Pain Machinery in 1992. The initial idea was to mix the raw energy of UK street punk and the sound exploring possibilities of electro/industrial music. Later joined by vocalist
Jonas Hedberg,
The Pain Machinery has continued to expand on their original formula through the years.
