Soulwax
All Systems Are Lying

The brothers Stephen and David Dewaele, the brain and synthetic arm of Soulwax, openly admit: “We’re a weird indie band that just can’t be indie. I mean, we can’t manage to be indie, so we end up doing it with synthesizers.” All of this converges ad litteram in the exhilarating fourteen tracks of ‘All Systems Are Lying’, a truly un-mainstream flow that endlessly refreshes that arcane friction between rock and electronics, transforming it into a current that is as lucid as it is unstable.

And in the impetuousness of track four New Earth Time, here comes, from an unspecified past, that electric quiver of modular synthesizers of kraut memory, intertwining, big beat in an Olympic twist, a love triangle of three analog drums that pulse as a single mechanical heart. Matrix in our minds, bodies living pre-ordained lives, planned processes. The truth works under the radar.

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Milan, January 2026. Walking under the arcades of Corso Matteotti, the morning covered in layers of thoughtful fog, retro new romantic maranza look, hood and glasses searching for mystery and phantom absence. That track and those lyrics that wouldn't let my eyes close “ All Systems are Lying “. Asystematic: All Systems are Lying- All Systems are Lying- All Systems are Lying. I can't, with all the Strength, get it out of my Head. Walking like a maranza zombie under Milan’s arcades, waiting to be picked up by a Delta Force air taxi. All Systems are Lying repeated to infinity in an electronic mantra, a labyrinth of pulses leading nowhere, sabbatical circular structure with the mind constantly bombarded by contradictory signals in which repetition itself becomes a new tool of control.

White and blinding light.

Now, though, gently preyed upon all of a sudden, by an electronic and asystematic entity. Truth is no longer a content but an effect, a design product, something that can be manufactured like a synthetic sound. Constant Happiness Machine, that electronic buzz, those Revelations. Learning to read distortions, recognizing interferences and unraveling the pattern. Wandering in the empty square, dreamy and staggering, constantly hooded. The shadow a friend and the sun a mirage, maybe it’s also because of that awful Milanese coffee sipped between the city center’s streets, and suddenly you notice a small scrap of sky, of deep blue, illuminating a spinning propeller following our shadows, speckled by a bad star that merges with sweet shivers. You were once in love, at least you were taken until August. Walking through the city center with that music in your headphones, slaloming between shadows and conceptual detonators - you don’t know what’s real anymore -you don’t know what’s real anymore- the enemy is real, it is defeated with its own weapons - repetition is already manipulation, the loss of reference points is already a lived experience. What is poetry, and what is noise. Interrupted by the fluent pulse of notifications. All Systems are Lying. Letting noise become structure, repetition become law, saturation become identity.

Like when Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey said “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” That sentence bouncing in the void and finding no hold, drifting away in the infinite echo of the loss of man’s centrality. Pills and People Gone ...Drowning in the Haze, take me to the edge, where colors fade, nothing left to feel, only a broken blade.

Irrelevant to the architecture. Now only transparent Bodies crossed by short circuits. Simulated by new and up-and-coming forms of life.

All of this, a grey and restless Milan, toxic coffee, that feeling of possibly being picked up by someone at any moment, all interwoven in this album’s plots.

Waiting for the veiled leap, in the ancient recess of the mind, where the spark of the Gods rests like an ember under stone.

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