You speak beautiful lies,
A fool cowers behind eyes
Your skin covers a mistake
My love gives, Yours just takes!
On the seductive new dark dance LP THROB, Bustié, Angelika Padilla’s (aka Pogo Pope) project turns club music into a sensual pressure valve. The album, delayed for six years and dedicated to Padilla’s late mother, arrives with grief in plain view and its body already moving. Padilla calls the project “Anarcho Body Music,” a phrase that lands with unusual precision: the record gathers freestyle, electro, UK punk, acid, disco, and new jack swing into songs built for dancing through fury, devotion, sex, and loss. “This is music for the minorities, this is Anarcho Body Music.” The sentence sounds like a mission, yet THROB is too bruised, lusty, funny, and vengeful to settle into mere manifesto. It keeps slipping from doctrine into appetite.
Perimeters of Love opens the album as a vow made in a room where sex and salvation share the same bed. The language is florid in the old Catholic-goth way, full of flame, moon, death, and reunion, but the track’s romance gains force from Padilla’s treatment of devotion as an act of mutual possession. The body becomes a chapel with a bass line; love becomes a pact with teeth. By the time Negative Approach hits, the vow has soured. The lover who once held cosmic value becomes a taker, a drain, a slick executor of false tenderness. Padilla writes breakup music with the heat turned toward judgment. Self-respect here has a blunt rhythm; escape arrives as overdue bookkeeping, the settling of an account.
Cruel Intentions makes desire grand and carnivorous. Padilla stages sex as rescue, threat, and collision, with bodies pressed together while inner beasts come alive. The song’s drama comes from scale: a kiss can save a life or end one, romance can grow into war, and pleasure can carry the charge of a blade held close to skin.
Smile Now, Cry Later lands with the rude snap of an old LA backyard party, drawing on freestyle drama, Miami booty-bass lift, and electro bite. Revenge often shrinks singers; here it enlarges the room. The track works because its cruelty has motion, and its motion has communal memory.
Miami pulls the album into a more wounded register. It name-checks the phrase “Anxious avoidant,” and Padilla treats the diagnosis as a polished excuse. The love song becomes a scene of abandonment by degrees: rings without vows, water rising, a partner mistaking explanation for absolution. The writing is plain where plainness hurts most. Bruise Control turns damage management into propulsion. Padilla understands the afterlife of a bad bond: the way one learns to bandage, perform health, recite morality, and keep moving through ruin. The song has a grim patience, as though healing were a machine task assigned to someone already exhausted. Its title is almost comic, which makes the pain sharper.
W.I.L.T. (Will Infatuation Last Tonight) gives the album one of its best jokes and one of its ugliest graves. Infatuation wilts into betrayal; a kiss travels where it should never have gone; roses, serpents, salt, and fire gather around a love that has been stripped of grace. Padilla’s gift, here and elsewhere, is her ability to make private humiliation feel theatrical without flattening its ache.
Lady of Dread is the album’s public nightmare. Truth is falsified, bodies pile up, and a fearsome feminine power presides over state violence, control, and confession. The beat takes Hi-NRG disco through dark electro pressure, giving the song a grim sort of civic theatre. Bubastis gives the album’s most grotesque tenderness. Obsession reaches the point of spoilage; desire crawls, then curdles; the beloved prince becomes compost. Few artists write rotting romance with such bodily precision, fewer still can make it feel ready for a crowded floor.
Across THROB, Padilla treats the dance track as a survival technology: a drum pattern can hold a grudge, a hook can shelter grief, a synth line can flirt with violence, and a chorus can turn pain into shared stamina. The record’s pleasures are blunt without being crude, theatrical without feeling overstuffed, political without becoming flaccid. Bustié has made an album about bodies under pressure, bodies in love, bodies in panic, bodies under law, bodies at the mercy of memory – and then gives those bodies somewhere to go. For a record born from delay, loss, and rage, THROB moves with enviable clarity: straight to the hips, straight to the wound, straight to the door of whatever system still expects quiet.
THROB is out now via Psychic Eye. Listen below and order the album here.
Bustie has shared stages with artists such as Das Ich, Xiu Xiu and Linea Aspera, and continues to expand its live presence, with a U.S. tour scheduled shortly after the album’s release.
Tour Dates:
May 22nd NYC, NY – TV Eye
May 30th Portland, OR – High Water Mark
May 31st – Oakland, CA – Eli’s Mile High Club
June 4th – Los Angeles, CA – Escondite
June 6th – Phoenix, AZ – Linger Longer Lounge
June 7th – Albuquerque, NM – Blackwall Gallery
June 8th – El Paso, TX – The Rosewood
June 10th – Austin, TX – Whiplash
June 11th – Houston, TX – The Way Up
June 12th – New Orleans, LA
June 13th – Chattanooga, TN
June 14th – Knoxville, TN – Cactus Club
June 15th – Asheville, NC – Static Age
June 16th – Charlotte, NC – Snug Harbor
June 17th – Richmond, VA – Fallout RVA
June 18th – Pittsburgh, PA – Rock Room
June 19th – Philadelphia, PA – The Catacombs
June 20th – Easton, PA – Club Coven
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The post “Whispers in the Night” — NYC Anarcho Body Music Project Bustié Turns Loss and Lust Into Dark Dance Sensuality on “THROB” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
