Boys Noize "Shut It Down" ft. TAICHU, Taube (Extended Mix)
by Boys Noize
About this track
Boys Noize exploded into festival season by playing Coachella twice—well, four times—both alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the premiere of their collaborative project Nine Inch Noize, and with myth-making solo sets at a packed Yuma tent. The tracklist for the latter has a shotgun blast of unknown IDs scattered throughout; they will not be unknown for long. The first of these reveals, “Shut it Down” proves that success only makes Boys Noize more confrontational and defiant. Survey club music today and you’ll find “Shut it Down” has few if any peers. The track pogos in around 155 BPM with a DAF-style analogue arpeggio, vacuum tubes straining to remain in key. The tempo makes it suitable to be mixed with the faster end of techno, but the drums break expectations with a pitched-down, punk band D-beat that lingers in the uncanny valley between live and sequenced. Hailing from Buenos Aires, a global capital of the young underground, Taichu amplifies the sonic worldbuilding of the track with a sprechgesang that is breathy, pained, and threatening all at once. Boys Noize shifts through rhythms as the track evolves, the straight 4/4 climax (likely refined by Taube’s signature bounce) finally arriving with Taichu’s titular command. Everything in “Shut it Down” seems to warp, sizzle and drip with sludge. At a time when AI can effortlessly generate slick content indistinguishable from reality, Boys Noize’s foregrounding of the materiality of the machines feels radical. The result is something mechanical, alive and menacing, the return of true cyberpunk to the feedback loop of the rave.