- Loud, fast and nearly out of control—this is not The Haxan Cloak we're used to.
- As The Haxan Cloak, Bobby Krlic has always made monumental, crushingly heavy music, and rarely has it felt danceable. Albums like Excavation were alchemical alloys of dark ambient, noise, metal and even neo-folk, with unsettling, hurdy gurdy-like strings up against harsh industrial sounds. "N/Y"—his first new piece of music under the name in a decade, and first since becoming a composer for television shows and films like Midsommar—isn't like that at all.
While it retains the foreboding atmosphere and eerie screeches of past work, "N/Y" is more like Krlic's take on modern club music, all juddering drums and doubled-up synths marching towards some terrifying crescendo. It's the sound of a night out gone wrong, when the mechanical rhythms start to sound sinister instead of hypnotic. The track started out as a semi-improvisational piece for his live show, and it has an jerky, anything-can-happen feel to it, tightly coiled beats falling into pits of sub-bass that quake like an angry stubbed toe. "N/Y" only becomes more frightening as it moves on, synths squealing louder and louder before the the track burns itself out with a gabber-friendly climax. What it lacks in the subtlety of Krlic's previous work, it makes up for in sheer exhilaration. Not quite danceable, but closer to it than before, "N/Y" is one hell of a comeback.