The backstory is almost too good to be fabricated, which is perhaps the surest sign that it is true. For the better part of fifteen years, this Rotterdam-based artist retreated into a tiny workshop and refused to emerge. Not to tour, not to release, not to perform. He went in and he shut the door, and what he was doing in there — what consumed nearly two decades of a human life — was building an instrument. Not assembling one from existing parts. Building one, from scratch, that had never previously existed. Named the Razor Belt by Shortout, it is made up of ninety-plus handmade keys, levers, springs from ballpoint pens, wood, metal, and heavy wiring — a hybrid between a chainsaw and a guitar. He then spent a further three years learning to play it virtuously. To get his hands, as he puts it, permanently attached to the thing. This is not the biography of a musician. It is the biography of an obsessive, a craftsman, a man conducting a fifteen-year argument with the limitations of available sound.
The question any such origin story immediately raises, of course, is whether the music justifies the mythology. Eccentricity of process means nothing if the product is merely odd. "Pet Song", the first significant transmission from the forthcoming debut album, answers that question with unusual force.
It begins with restraint. A solitary melodic line unfolds gently, almost hesitantly, drawing the listener into a space that feels intimate and introspective. That softness, however, is never allowed to settle. Beneath it, a synthetic pulse quietly emerges, distant yet insistent, gradually tightening the atmosphere rather than expanding it. It is a structural gambit borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, from the quieter moments of early Portishead or the slow-burn terror of mid-period Radiohead — the sense that something is approaching from a long way off, and that you will not be entirely prepared for it when it arrives. You are not.
When the Razor Belt announces itself fully, the effect is both visceral and strangely moving. This is the fused and electrified offspring of the bearers of raw from a former era — Radiohead's emotional devastation, Nirvana's blunt-instrument catharsis, the Smashing Pumpkins' cathedral of distortion — crossed with the motorik fury of The Prodigy and the euphoric dread of Underworld. And yet to list these names is to risk suggesting derivation, when the reality is something closer to the opposite. These homages act as distant ancestors to something far more insane and original. Shortout Kid has not absorbed his influences so much as put them through an industrial process — fed them into the Razor Belt and retrieved something unrecognisable on the other side.
Beneath the abrasive surface lies something unexpectedly tender. There is a core melody here that feels exposed, as if the track is constantly balancing between destruction and confession. This is the detail that lifts "Pet Song" above the merely impressive into something genuinely affecting. Noise music — real noise music, the kind that means it — is never simply about volume or aggression. It is about what the aggression is protecting. What the walls of sound are built to guard. Here, what lies inside all that ferocity is a song of striking vulnerability, a soft and naked thing that the Razor Belt simultaneously expresses and defends. The violence is not the point. The softness is the point. The violence is just how it gets said.
The vocals mirror this balance: soft, high, and seemingly delicate, yet tinged with an acidic edge that hints at something unresolved. They arrive and depart like signals through interference, never quite settling into conventional melody, always slightly out of reach. The lyrical terrain — emotional proximity warped by confusion, closeness that cannot find its own language — suits the sonic approach with the precision of a key turning in a lock it was made for.
You can feel the years behind this in the sheer commitment to a vision that refuses to compromise. No Transmission That is, in the end, what "Pet Song" most powerfully communicates — not genre, not influence, not even pure sonic innovation, but the particular quality of work that has been done without an audience in mind, without the distorting pressure of commercial expectation, without any voice in the room suggesting that perhaps this is taking too long, that perhaps the instrument is strange enough already, that perhaps it is time to come out of the workshop and just make do with a Fender Stratocaster like everybody else. He did not make do. He kept going. And the music sounds exactly like that decision: absolute, costly, and utterly irreplaceable.
Whether the debut album can sustain this intensity across its full arc remains an open question. But as an opening declaration — as a flare fired from inside fifteen years of darkness — "Pet Song" burns a very long time. Product of sheer madness, yes. But also, unmistakably, of sheer mastery.
Single out now. Debut album forthcoming.