HOLY FUCK - Event Beat

The Canadian quartet has always built its identity on a simple but effective paradox: playing electronic music as if it were a rock band, favoring improvisation, analog instruments and as physical and "played" a dimension as possible. With "Event Beat", their sixth studio album and first work since "Deleter" (2020), this philosophy isn't reinvented so much as reaffirmed with a fair amount of consistency.

The album was born in an almost ascetic context: a creative reunion in a village hall in rural Nova Scotia, after years of forced distance. This return to musical cohabitation seems to have reactivated the band's internal grammar, a sort of shared language built up over time, made of repetitive grooves, analog circuitry and sudden noisy detours. The result is a record that moves along a rather interesting line of balance: on one side a pulsing, percussive electronic art-rock, on the other a more synthetic dimension that occasionally brushes up against synth-funk or a faintly psychedelic kraut-rock.

The opener "Evie" is probably one of the album's most successful moments: nervy bass, intermittent synths and a voice that emerges like a scattered poetic fragment amid the noise. Here you find that typical Holy Fuck blend of oblique grooves and controlled chaos. Shortly after, tracks like "Czar" and "Ice Box" show the band's more abrasive side, with industrial rhythms, cutting basslines and a use of distortion that becomes almost a structural element of the composition.

At the same time, the record also opens up into more expansive spaces. "Gold Flakes" moves on an almost kraut-rock motorik beat, slowly stretching out into a hypnotic trance, while "Elevate" seems to flirt with a more atmospheric form of techno euphoria, gradually layering synths and pulses. Here the nature of the project fully reveals itself: a sonic laboratory where repetition, improvisation and accumulation become the main tools for building tension.

The tracks rarely follow a classic verse-chorus structure: instead they develop through horizontal expansion, via rhythmic patterns that gradually transform. It's a compositional method that owes much to minimalism and the most radical strain of kraut-rock (from Can's "Tago Mago" to the rhythmic experiments of a certain strand of New York post-punk) but filtered through a contemporary, almost urban sensibility, where language behaves almost like a sonic object.

And yet, despite the wealth of ideas and the evident mastery in weaving together rhythms and textures, "Event Beat" also leaves a slightly ambiguous feeling. The energy is there, and so are the ideas, but the album struggles to sustain a truly memorable arc from start to finish. Some tracks land immediately, others go by without leaving quite as strong a mark.

Without a doubt, Holy Fuck once again prove they possess a recognizable sonic identity and a rare ability to make electronic music feel alive, imperfect and human. Still, the overall result remains slightly more modest than the expectations a comeback after six years might have raised.

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24/04/2026