Lovefear - Schema (2024)

You’re blessed to be hearing the long-awaited Lovefear debut album, live and listenable courtesy of TT.

‘Schema’ is a work of deep focus, a slow-spiralling plunge into a zone of enhanced awareness. What unfolds is crisp yet hallucinatory, like the HD visions of some hyper-advanced biomechanical life form animated by psychotropic research chemicals.

‘Mother Null’ and ‘Red Thought’ render images of flickering holograms on gleaming glass architecture; 360° interfaces and synthetic neuro-inputs. There’s an air of gradually realised tension and unease, a sense of something uncanny at the core of the cybernetic sheen. But Sydney Bass honcho 3NDLES5 lays down a human touch, his impressionistic spoken word flow on ‘Inner’ conjuring smeared metropolitan light pollution and the romanticised blur of half-remembered late night transit.

And then there’s ‘Macro’ and ‘Swan Cross Antonym’. Flurries of accelerated consciousness, a mind operating on evolved firmware. These are aerodynamic flow-state tunes, cold-blooded bangers pulsing forward like quicksilver through veins. But ‘Economy of Ascent’ brings it all down to an introspective simmer — because for all its screen-mediated gloss, ‘Schema’ is deeply felt, not calculated.