SixSixSevenFortySeven: Wounded Dogs LP

YOUTH back with their strongest outing in a minute on the debut full length from SixSixSevenFortySeven, the pairing of NVST & Zohar, offering a full dose of minimalist bruk ballistics and murky pressure, variously comparable to the trip hop slugs and rough hewn dub and concrète of MOBBS x Susu Laroche, Marina Rosenfeld x Warrior Queen and Kode9 and The Spaceape’s Sign "O" the Times refix. Aye it’s hard, special stuff.

In an often barely legible hush and haze, NVST & Zohar speak to “the gritty realities of love, vulnerability, and resilience” in structures that embrace negative space, deploying a minimalist palette of granite-cut bass grinds, arid drums and stress-test atonalities rendered in a dubwise atmospheric pressure. It starts out shifty as fuck with disorienting noise diffusions recalling ronce’s feral ASMR gore, before the worm-charm tremors of ‘I Stood There’ establishes themes that thread the album, touching on tantric sensuality in ‘Pleasure of Endurance’ and spirit-gnawing dissonance in ‘Can You See Me’.

NVST’s french accented narration sits well with Zohar’s sparse production, both taking the opportunity to swerve toward uncertain, nervy, downbeat interzones. The gurned torque of ‘F4ck’ uncannily recalls CoH’s glitched dissection of Cosey in their standout ‘Fuck It’ both in title and tone, whilst the likes of ‘Poffertjes’ contrasts the wickedly cruddy bong-bubble bop ‘Don’t Trouble no Trouble’ and an ultimate decent into mired noise. 

Seductive on its brooding, intimate merits, it’s our fave YOUTH for a bit, tipped for the freaks.