PC World: the band you need to hear if you love Front 242
Allegedly, when forming Front 242 back in 1981, co-founders Daniel Bressanutti and Dirk Bergen favoured the “front” in their title due to its universal definition across many tongues, as well as conveying urgent interpretations of popular uprisings or organised disobedience.
It’s a perfect name. Tacking on the “242” and subsuming Underviewer’s Patrick Codenys and Jean-Luc De Meyer into the cabal, the quartet led Belgium’s new beat that belligerently pulled new wave synths and drum machines into beefier, martial territory.
After early exercises in taut, frigid coldwave, 1984’s sophomore LP No Comment would cement their bruising EBM assault on European dancefloors. A pivotal album both sonically and aesthetically, Front 242 would hone their electronic attack to harder, fiercer blasts of industrial club that sought to inject an energised and menacing muscle to the dance charts.
With the hyper-animated Richard 23 joining the previous year, the band shrouded themselves in the tech-ravaged media anxieties of the day, paramilitary uniforms, and artwork capturing snapshots of conflict fed through the media machine, channelling the Cold War’s shadow cast over the fraught continent.
Front 242’s aggressive pummel would soon reach America. Finding a distributor with Chicago’s Wax Trax! Records and taken under Ministry captain Al Jourgensen’s wing, the EBM cohort would eventually strike cyber gold with 1988’s Front by Front. A perfect distillation of their sample-saturated, synthetic beat heft and caustic grooves, overseeing a brief flirtation with the mainstream off the back of the primal ‘Headhunter’ single, pushed to alternative MTV airwaves by Anton Corbijn’s stylish promo video.
While Front 242 would persist as a studio project up until 2003’s Pulse, the early 1990s rivethead explosion they’d unwittingly ushered soon waned, seemingly confined to a unique chapter in alternative music and littered by many derivatives not fit to tie their 12 eye boots. Yet, in the mid-2000s, industrial reared its head once again. Enamoured with Wax Trax!’s halcyon days, groups like //TENSE//, followed by Youth Code and High-Functioning Flesh, sought to resurrect the bold and combative EBM that Front 242 had pioneered decades prior.
Following this mutoid-club reawakening was south London’s PC World. Formed at the tail end of the 2010s and resulting in one of the many groups that orbit the Gob Nation punk collective, livewire frontman William Dante Deacon and imposing electronics commander Ryan Bellet exorcised EBM’s somatic spirit but spiked it with white-hot flashes of shimmering synthpop sheen that radiates through their acidic, electronic crust.
PC World is no rehash of old industrial tropes and retro fetishism, however. Honouring the scene’s thematic anxieties of society’s enmeshing with rapacious technology, the duo complements their modern reshape of cyberpunk with prescient lyrical examinations of corporatised violence, society’s closing confines, and a discoloured mediasphere gaslighting the public into fear and submission. Such dystopian themes are married with a pumped and high-velocity live show, with Deacon pumping the crowd bathed in shadows and flickering light alongside an enigmatic Bellet hunched over a table of hardware and synths.
After nearly 45 years, Front 242 embarked on the Black Out tour as their farewell, appropriately closing their live finale at Brussels’ Ancienne Belgique and stamping a full stop on their celebrated EBM legacy. With the likes of PC World and a whole manner of tech-ravaged post-punks from Night in Athens, Spike Hellis, Strange Futures, and Multiple Man, the industrial heritage looks set to be in safe hands, twisted and crumpled into new and strange forms reflecting the contemporary, political miasma.
