How long since we’ve had any new music from Iron Lung? Eight years since anything readily attainable, by my reckoning. For anyone slavering for another dose of the band’s brutally inventive power violence, this new release serves almost as a goad: three songs (one a Rudimentary Peni cover) which take up four minutes’ worth of space on a one-sided flexi. Brief as it is, the music is as brilliant and blazing as you’d expect. ‘The Psychology Of Quarantine’ begins with some ominous surgical clanks before weighing frenetic blasts up against torn-metal discords, while ‘Everything Is A Void’ opens with a huge, dragged-out moment of portentous dread only to rocket off into oblivion. The band’s take on ‘Only Human’, meanwhile, is faithfully unfaithful: a gluey, mind-fogged iteration which sees HIDE’s Heather Gabel providing vocals and the familiar riffing smooshed and smothered by washes of watery noise. At first nod it’s an odd way to close things out – the stumbling, spaced-out, semi-coherence seemingly at odds with the band’s precision-tooled dynamic – but when you consider the brain-fucking effects of COVID, lockdown and slow-motion societal meltdown that backdrop it then, heck, it starts to make all sorts of sense.
