FOETUS - Halt

This ain’t a TV show, this is for real

Just to make clear that, once again this time around, the revolution won't be televised – unless it's with a bullet. The finger on the trigger belongs to someone who knows all too well about atrocities. He has probed the most bestial recesses of the unconscious (his own, first and foremost), flushed out the scum of the filthiest cities, given voice to the unspeakable and the unacceptable. The present calls, James George Thirlwell answers. And don't expect any absolution.

His first work in twelve years (eight of which, he tells us, were spent refining this album), it stubbornly carries on the tradition of monosyllabic titles: after "Deaf", "Pain", "Hole", "Nail" and so on, this time a curt "Halt" arrives to jolt us upright in our seats. Written, produced and largely performed by the Wagner of Melbourne, it's an anti-musical in which the author's well-known ferocity sifts through the contemporary world, with terrifying results.

A malevolent update of that symphonic-industrial grandeur that is his trademark, "Succulence" opens with a slurring, Waits-ian crooning, bursts open into a declamation worthy of Little Simz without Little Simz, spanks his disciple Trent, and dies out in a string-laden agony redolent of Bernard Herrmann, spitting out lines that leave no escape ("Because when war's declared/ There may be no taboos/ You are found guilty if you have already been accused"). It deserves an immediate spot among the peaks of his career, no more, no less.

As usual, there are no restrictions on the choice of weaponry: to annihilate and be annihilated, JG charges headlong with the cyber-thrash of Ministry-style "Die Alone" or the Touch And Go-branded noise of "Rabbit Hole", but that doesn't stop him from turning contemplative on the Celtic ballad "Scurvy" and the medieval-tinged march of "Warships". A supreme scorer of films no one would dare shoot, on "The World Is Broken" he has a sulphurous gospel bitten by the shark of John Williams, while "Dead To Me" sounds like a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer rejected by the production before it was even heard.

Consolidating his standing as a learned composer and masterful weaver of synthetic melodramas are three unmatched otherworldly pièces: the noir-flavoured Coil of "Harpoon", the Celtic Frost-style inferno of "Crater", and the ethereal dungeon levitation of "Polar Vortex", a hair's breadth from Carpenter.

A virtuoso of the guttural growl elevated to bel canto, Thirlwell once again proves himself one of the most devilish performers around as he lays out existential reckonings worthy of Michael Gira ("Let me die alone/ And just put on my tombstone 'He tried and failed and here he lays'") or slaps down the most idiotic conspiracy theories with a full hand ("Our plans are in demand and Q just said so/ The deep state is coming and they're re making all our children gay"), right up to a smirking self-quotation (that "throne of agony" evoked on "Many Versions Of Me"). And in defiance of the closing track's prophecy of death, our hero already has a follow-up scheduled for 2027: reassuring, at least, that even he still foresees a tomorrow.

When you need me, I am not for sale

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03/02/2026