Pleasure Symbols is one of those bands that comes out of nowhere with a fully-formed, distinctive aesthetic. The duo from Brisbane makes icy, goth-tinged synth rock that combines like 30 different styles into something that feels like a genre of its own. Pleasure Symbols is their first 12-inch and it’s just four songs in about 16 minutes, but I listened to almost every song on repeat at some point.
The defining choice Pleasure Symbols make is taking a page out of the shoegaze playbook and burying their vocals deep in the mix. The cost is that it’s hard to make out a lot of the lyrics, but it adds to the band’s mysterious, seductive quality and is part of what made their album very replayable for me. Their songs rely heavily on repetition, looping one or two synth parts over and over, which along with the vocal mixing makes this a hypnotizing listen.
The Noise Made By People 