The disruptive art world figure Shardcore (Eric Drass) has adopted the name Drass for this unexpected debut: his first sideways slide into solo music-making. He’s based in Brighton, so I’m long familiar with Shardcore and his visual work, which mixes media including painting and elaborate conceptual installation with degenerative art online, often in glitchy Dadaist collab with machine learning tools. With his rhino-horn quiff and black varnished nails, a classy dresser, he cuts a ubiquitous silhouette around town, at our juicier tech gatherings, or propping up the bar at a certain kind of indie gig. Still, I wasn’t remotely imagining this excellently realised lurch into electronica-based declamatory pop. Furious and funny, debut album On The Hill pulls together underlying threads of investigation, including ‘aliens among us’ conspiracy paranoia, serious state-of-the world despair, wild hallucination and even telepathy.
Opener ‘Reaperman’ is a sampled conversation doing Fortean Times style world-building. Then Drass speaks – deceptively gently – on first single ‘The Spectacle’. We’re set up for his less autodidactic, more classically intellectual iteration of the Sleaford Mods or Interrobang‽ blueprint. Production lands between vintage Burial and 90s rave, say Orbital or 808 State. Drass claims this track is inspired by Guy Debord’s late 60s Marxist critical theory classic Society Of The Spectacle. His tongue may be in his cheek.
On ‘Observing (The Unknown)’ he sings and we’re nudged towards even more vintage influences: it’s a Gary Numan, even a Depeche Mode bop, though the edgelord aesthetic hovers close. Over repeat listens, what I’m hugely enjoying about On The Hill is how these jams are never dry essays or top-line diatribes. Drass hones his affected exhortation into a philosophically literate call-to-arms. Even if it’s hard to avoid the feeling the whole shebang is a big joke. This cannot be though, surely: too much devotion has been put into the craft beneath the proclamations. ‘You Bet’ exemplifies this: a minimal instrumental of wordless vocal samples. It’s beautiful. Proof of the pudding. Later, the jazzy ‘Hookup’ does this too.
Another highlight is single ‘Tridactyl’. Downtempo big-beat, a dulcimer hook and a proper chanty chorus that poses as epic. No surprise – his deeply unsettling AI-driven videos punch hard. Hazy or even elegiac, suddenly they will ripple with an oleaginous Cronenberg-ish gross-out horror quality. This gives the songs a heft akin to a great comedy actor playing it deadpan.
Taking it seriously, On The Hill corrals its fizzing and glitching, its brutal state-of-the-world realism and then its oddball sidebars into dazzling freakout psychedelia with real skill. If this foray into music is just a gag – an art scene side-eye – then it is far, far better than it needed to be. I hope it’s more. In the end, whether Drass gives a shit or not, he’s gifted us a thrilling mishmash that deserves to resonate far beyond his diffident fine art and tech bro circles.
