Synthpunk Veterans Damage Release “How To Talk To Humans” Remix EP

Some bands require a guitar to prove they are angry. Damage emerged from Orlando in the early 1980s and solved the problem with analog synthesizers, live drums, and vocals indicative of a disciplinary problem. Now based in Brooklyn, founding members Mike Brown and Joe Livingston, with Joshua Clark on synth and backing vocals, still treat punk as a body under stress: fast reactions, bad manners, bright panic, and a beat that knows exactly where the exit sign is.

The new HOW TO TALK TO HUMANS remix EP puts that history through a dance-floor prism without sanding away the band’s old voltage. At the center are two new Damage originals. Carriage Horses is the harder charge, a hardcore blast rerouted through keys and kit. How To Talk To Humans is the brighter attack, a synth-punk address to a species that has spent too long confusing communication with transmission.

The video understands the joke and the injury. A weird animated trip along the lines of cyberspace, it rides the Misinformation Superhighway while taking pointed shots at the moguls cooking the planet and calling it progress. The mood lands between Devo’s corporate prankster theory and George Orwell’s bureaucratic nightmare, with comic velocity to keep the sermon from going sour. Even the captions get in on the gag, with good ol’ Zapf Chancery and Chicago fonts making cameos like office ghosts called back for one last HR violation.

Damage can sound ridiculous in the best possible sense, then suddenly be accurate about the age we are living in. Their world is full of blinking screens, false friendliness, plastic orders, management language, and people trying to remember how mouths worked before every feeling became data. How To Talk To Humans turns alienation into a singalong for citizens who have been logged, sold, sorted, and advised to update their preferences.

The remixes expand the room: Richie Dio brings New York club experience, drawing from house, tech house, and the memory of Tunnel and Limelight floors. Providence’s Knowlton Walsh leans into deeper motion, giving Mike Brown’s vocal fragments a nervous architecture. Tommy “MOT” Barger returns from a long DJ hiatus with a Dance Don’t Dance remix that links late-80s underground body music to modern EBM muscle. Livingston’s own remixes keep the family argument going.