Pop Mutations presents: Locust

Mark Van Hoen's project Locust has been in existence since the early 1990s, acclaimed for their singular permutations which have taken in everything from IDM (Van Hoen has previously played shows with Aphex Twin and Autechre), My Bloody Valentine, Trip Hop to Eno, and their latest line-up began to take shape in 2024. "Olive Kimoto (vocals, keyboards) instigated all this. I was playing a solo show in September 2024 and she came to that. She had been running a club called Heaven or Los Angeles, a Cocteau Twins reference which I immediately liked. When we met, she said how much she liked my music. She did a two hour radio special with me on my music and we decided to collaborate." The new Locust played their first show in 2025, the first show back since opening for Massive Attack in the 90s, and since then they have fleshed out new material for a new album, Spectral+, with parts added as developed onstage. "We're establishing this identity as a live band. We've really bonded, all really good friends, all rooting for it. People can see we're a tight band, they're not hired hands." The band also includes Derek Mabra on guitar and Jaelyn Valero on drums. Spectral+, which builds on the success of the previous Locust album, is an eclectic, uniquely slanted collection of songs which use classic influences as jumping off points into fresh waters. The album title reflects the sheer variegation, the range of colour across these songs, as well as implying something of the sense of spectres of pop's past. "I'm much more interested in songs these days, the songwriting process," says Van Hoen. So, "Shape Of Another", with its heavy, radioactive buzz, reminds faintly of The Bug as well as echoes of very early Locust material. "Long Distance Lover", with its chromium neo-synthpop and echoing guitar figurines, rings out with Neil Halstead's unmistakable guitar, while "All Of Them" feels like epic pop from a parallel universe, with vocals from Nick Holton of the group Black Hearted Brother (a project with Mark Van Hoen and Neil Halstead). There's a dazzling intervention from left field in the shape of rapper Griff Spex, who appears on two tracks, including "Soul Sky", with its clustered backbeat and siren loop. "He contacted me because he loved my very early music, the first album. His own music has an industrial electronic edge to it. He's from Queens, close to the home of rap music. He's a real New Yorker and likes investigating different styles of music." "No Space For Love" features a blaze of old school synths in a fresh context (Van Hoen was impacted as a kid by the 70s productions of Giorgio Moroder), while "Going Nowhere" reminds a little of Boards Of Canada in its celestial trails of electronics, rolling percussion and reverberant, existentially forlorn vocals. The reproachful "Face It", which features words no man cares to hear, "you are not doing enough", combines textures including idiosyncratic droplets of guitar to create a weave like no other. Finally, the aristocratic swell of "In The Service Of Others", suffused with a sort of defiant melancholy, has its closest musical relation in Brian Eno's "Spider And I".