Isotope Soap — Messypolarity

There’s a particular kind of sound that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once — no faces, no biography, no scene photos to anchor it. Isotope Soap has always worked that way. A Swedish project, anonymous by design, that has spent years building something between early American hardcore’s blunt-force economy and the colder, more mechanical logic of industrial noise, with a streak of surreal art-rock running underneath like a fault line. I’m coming to it late — this isn’t a discovery made the week it happened, but months after — and that lateness doesn’t diminish it. If anything, it’s the kind of catalogue that rewards arriving without the noise of a release cycle around it.

The lineage is there if you listen for it. Crass’s confrontational directness sits somewhere in the DNA, filtered through something closer to The Screamers’ synth-mad theatrics — that same sense of electronics as a weapon rather than a texture. And there’s a bent, absurdist humor running through it too, the kind The Residents built a career out of: nothing here is entirely serious, even at its most abrasive. Dada hovers over the whole project, less a direct reference than a permission structure — the idea that noise and nonsense can be a legitimate way of saying something real.

What draws me back to this project isn’t any single track — it’s the way the whole catalogue refuses to sit still. One minute it’s anarcho-punk urgency, all clenched-jaw repetition; the next it folds into analog synth-punk, buzzing and mechanical. And then there’s the rhythm section: precise, almost indifferent to the chaos happening around it, as if the noise were an argument and the drums were the only thing not raising its voice.

Messypolarity, the new CD compilation on Other Voices Records, gathers two albums that had previously only existed on vinyl — An Artifact Of Insects (2020) and In Need of Systematic Entropy (2022), both originally released through Push My Buttons — alongside three new pieces. It’s the first time this catalogue has existed on CD at all, a chance to hear the arc of the project laid out in one continuous listen rather than as separate vinyl artifacts encountered months apart.

The new material doesn’t soften anything. ‘Honey Man’ and ‘Drake Equation’ sit comfortably inside the same cold-mechanical register as the earlier work, and ‘Love Hard’ — a collaboration with Roger Karmanik’s Brighter Death Now — pulls the whole thing further into death industrial territory without losing the anarcho-punk backbone.

Anonymity, in Isotope Soap’s case, isn’t a gimmick — it’s structurally consistent with the music itself. Nothing here asks to be read as personal expression in the confessional sense. It reads more like a system: insectile, repetitive, indifferent to whether anyone’s listening. That’s precisely what makes it worth listening to.

Messypolarity is out now on CD via Other Voices Records (VOX 85 CD).
Text © 2026 Ian Joy / Catastrophe Ballet, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Album artwork © Isotope Soap / Other Voices Records, all rights reserved, used here for editorial/critical purposes.