The Comet Is Coming grab you by the head and don’t let go with their relentless and fiery sound, “at once eliciting thoughts of impending doom and possible hope” (Pitchfork). The ingredients: 80s synth models, saxophone and drums, sprinkled with visceral punk rock, interstellar jazz blasts, and dance-floor trances.
On their fourth album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, The Comet Is Coming – synth magician/producer Danalogue, drummer-producer Betamax, and saxophonist/spiritual riffologist Shabaka– burn brightly, soundtracking our epoch of change in ways their contemporaries simply aren’t trying to.
The process: emerging straight from lockdown, the trio went to Peter Gabriel’s Real World decked out studio tucked away in the English countryside. With the help of the band’s longtime engineer Kristian Craig Robinson, the trio embarked on a four-day long recording process guided by collective intuition, sheer skill, and transcendent improvisation. Next, Danalogue and Betamax fastidiously sampled the band’s own creations, alchemically weaving the out-of-body musical collisions with microscopic attention to detail in the production room. This distillation process yields a profound coherent musical message about the future of technology, humankind, spirituality, and the connectivity of the universe. Which just so happens to rock.
Tracks like “Pyramids,” drenched in layers of controlled synth-syncopation and Shabaka’s iconic minimalism pulsing forward and “Atomic Wave Dance” are stone-cold bangers, made for a nightclub on a space station. “Lucid Dreamer,” on the other hand is a vulnerable and emotional guided meditation led by Danalogue’s Ensoniq synth, which eerily evokes humanoid choir voicings through technology. This album has the unrelenting, driving and fiery muscle that Comet is known for, but creates a space where ideas about the future – dystopian or hopeful – technology, artificial intelligence, hidden meanings and transcendental transformations can exist.
The Comet Is Coming formed when Soccer96 – Danalogue and Betamax’s synth-drum tron-like duo – were playing and captured jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings attention. After some tentative conversations between the duo and Shabaka, he hopped on stage at a show on a trial run and the energy coarsed between the trio and Comet was born. This union was a result of, as Danalogue describes it, “the algorithm of fate.” See, they all attended Guildhall School of Music where Dan and Max met - but Dan and Shabaka were a tale of missed connections as they shared the same saxophone teacher. Thankfully, fate’s algorithm guided the trio together. Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam follows their 2019 Trust In The Life Force of the Deep Mystery, which garnered praise from NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, Washington Post, and their follow-up EP The Afterlife. This is their third full-length studio album.
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