Apparently John Maus has spent some of the six years since his last album finishing his doctorate in political philosophy. Perhaps he should have taken a degree in common sense, given his worrying assignations with the “alt-right”, and daft assertions such as “the notion of the homosexual is really an invention of the 19th and 20th centuries”. Luckily, Screen Memories isn’t particularly political, and all the better for its lack of lyrical ambition. Instead, it’s the teenage nihilism of songs such as The Combine, its muffled vocal presumably due to the presence of both feet in his mouth, that proves the perfect subject for Maus’s gothic synth pop.
