Rating: 3/5 
For their latest release, primary songwriters Chris Bug and Ivan Lip brought on drummer Zach Ziemann (previously of Twin Stumps) and bassist/sound engineer Pascal Ludet. The newer additions to Pop. 1280 have filled out the group’s collaborative sound since 2010′s The Grid, a bloody-cybernetic guitar commentary on New York City. Think being stuck in Tron and feeling like you have to vomit your way back to the arcade reality set in Times Square. Lyrics of divine pessimism, gangrene bass lines and serrated guitars animate passages from Don DeLillo’s White Noise and invoke images of David Cronenberg’s Scanners.
The Horror exhibits the punk drunken foursome with righteous anger, unafraid of synthesized elements of texture, recalling the scrappiness of early Nine Inch Nails. Since their 2009 self-released 7″ Bedbugs, though, the group’s sound has been characterized as schizophrenically influenced. Always derivative but never formless, Pop. 1280 brings to mind the Sex Pistols, early Magazine, Hüsker Dü, Lubricated Goat and contemporaries like Digital Leather. Opener “Burn the Worm” even recalls NYC fringe scene mates the Royal Baths with its angular guitar noise alongside steady, rumbling low-end toms and kick drum. “Nature Boy” is a drain hole of scuzz, a place where distortion pedals go to die. The Horror at its core is noise music with hooks set to Bug’s anecdotes of cultural frustrations. On the Link Wray zombie blast “West World,” Bug sings, “You can’t find a bridge too high/ Keep your gun up/ Be a star” while the band thrashes head on, always playing on the edge.
To put Pop. 1280 into perspective, you can consider that conversely there are plenty of artists right now excited about the present and the future. See Cut Copy, Neon Indian or M83, for instance. All these projects are also influenced by cinema and have made records within the last year about now and next Tuesday. But for them, the apocalypse is survivable. It’s colored with soft pinks and blues and there are psychedelic frogs and pyramids and beautiful Polish robots. Not for these dudes. Pop. 1280 oozes toxic waste, yellow corpses and heaps of messy frayed wires. The paranoia, postmodernism sickness, anxiety are all signifiers which correlate with the album’s art. A man lays on his side, mouth and face covered in a makeshift hazard mask with goggles and a police officer helmet. The record jacket is overlaid with a sickly green color that hints at an industrial swamp-fi listen waiting inside. On some tracks, they’re certain the apocalypse has already happened and then on others it’s just about to but no one is doing anything about it. If you’re sick of optimistic fantasy, give Pop. 1280 a try. It will ruin your week.
