“House On Fire.” “Let The Wind Erase Me.” “Spark.” “The Noise Inside My Head.” “Bravery.” “Welcome, Apocalypse.” And… hmm?

The new A23 record, Null, arrived a few days ago and I’ve given it a few listens through. If you need a quick one-liner take, I’d say that every one of the ten songs lands somewhere between pretty good and very good, and I’m very pleased with my purchase. I wonder, though: Are any of these pieces going to join the roster of all-time-favorite head-bopping earworms like the above list?

Or does that matter?

Going into the writing of this post I queued up the whole new album… preceded by one favorite track each from the previous A23 albums in my library. It isn’t that I’m putting the new songs “up against” the older ones. Rather, I’m trying to get a feel for the trajectory of Tom Shear’s art style and how the new work plots on that chart. (Can you turn art into math? I probably can’t. Metaphors are hard, y’all.)

One thing becomes clear via a speedy recap of the highlights of the previous half-dozen albums: Shear’s increasingly comfortable letting his voice come through more and more clearly. Make no mistake: This is still electronica, there’s digital distortion galore. In the earlier days, though, he often buried his voice under effects and drowned it in the mix. That’s no longer always the case here, nor was it on Mourn, the previous album. (Sometimes the song calls for it, though, as on Null‘s “Lunatics.”)

And the voice is key throughout this album, as it has what I could mildly refer to as “some things to say”. I mean:

I can’t abide the bigotry, I can’t abide the hate
There’s a limit to what the tolerant themselves will tolerate

— Assemblage 23, “Tolerate”

Sing it, man.

(Amused side note: For such a words-forward presentation, it’s interesting that the song titles here consist of only one word each… except for “The Line,” which gets a leading article.)

The song which comes closest to a sonic throwback to older A23 comes near the end of the record in the form of the dense, hooky, distorted-as-hell “Overthrow.” I kind of love it, both message and medium. It has a good chance of joining that line-up of “hits” I rattled off at the start of this piece, alongside “Tolerate.” At the same time… I’m not sure that’s where Tom Shear is heading with this project. It’s more of a fun callback to the old ways rather than trying to fit the new ways into the old groove. Not that most of these songs aren’t energetic, head-bopping, toe-tapping electronica! Indeed they are, but… cleaner, for lack of a better word. The sonic landscape gets just a bit more out of the way of the words, which you can increasingly tell are meant to be the true focus. In years past it almost felt like the beats and the sounds and the words were fighting for the same breath of air. The results were often exhilarating, mind you.

But with Mourn (which was then and still feels today like The Most 2020 Album Ever) and now Null it feels like the Assemblage 23 project has entered a new level of maturity while still not sounding like a full, radical departure from past efforts. I hope we get more along this path in years to come.