Bonnacons Of Doom - Signs (2023)

Traversing the everyday in 2023, the need for catharsis only grows stronger. Enter Bonnacons Of Doom, progenitors of Trans Pennine hypnotic music. This mirror masked collective, amassed from across the North of England, have stepped up their mission accordingly on Signs – their second album for Rocket Recordings.

Signs takes the band’s engagement with tradition and ritual on a new trajectory, tracking forward into our digital lives and exploring how our actions are shaped by the post-human environment. New rituals and behavioural patterning evolve in response to the dominance of digital flows and interactions. The desire to reconnect to the ancient and the mystic grows stronger as our daily lives become ever more enmeshed within waves of information and disinformation.

The accelerated course into the post-digital begs pause for thought on this new realm’s impact on human and ecological development. Building on the intimidating intensity of Bonnacons Of Doom’s self-titled 2018 debut, Signs offers a sonic response to the tension between the urge to pursue continuity with our past and to adapt to our changing present. Hypnotic grooves and the monomaniacal intensity of the riff are fractured by digital interplay, electronics and the incantatory vocals of ceremonial leader Kate Smith, coalescing into a metaphysical force which stands defiant of easy categorisation.

"The past five years has really accelerated a sense of confusion" states the band's Rob Strachan. "I think we’re in a period of post-digital decay and in a sense the album is naturally a response to that. I think everyone feels out of control and we’re all trying to make sense of a period where it feels like everything is falling apart. So I think culturally and politically there’s a tendency to look for emergent signs to explain things that are essentially chaotic. Pattern recognition is a key part of being a human so we all look for signs even if their interpretations are misaligned or totally out there"

"There was definitely a conscious decision to address the real world more explicitly on this record. It’s much more lyric based than the first album but still trying to channel something otherworldly or spiritual" reflects Kate.

"The idea of signs works as a multiple metaphor across the album" she adds. "Signs related to differing aspects of being human” The title track 'Signs' itself - which shoots the band’s elemental forces through a fragmented electronic prism to liberation and transcendence anew – “…is about looking for signs from the universe and wanting to feel connected to a greater whole”. ‘Facing’, meanwhile, the album’s opener - volleying forth with a riff-driven aural assault as graceful as it is steadfast - “…is about having to fight for everything. Standing when there are multiple obstacles in the way.”

Signs marks both a portent of things to come, and a roadmap of the psychic pathways to survival. Within these otherworldly manifestations lurks solace in a place where the transcendent powers of heavy amplification, sonic explorations and forces darker and more unknowable can coalesce to cathartic and redeeming effect.