*Bring All Your Lovers* opens without ceremony and without apology. Anton Malmqvist's drums land like boots on concrete — four-on-the-floor, relentless, almost militantly simple — and then the guitars arrive, lush with reverb and flange, shimmering at the edges like heat off summer tarmac. The production, handled entirely by the duo themselves, is an act of controlled chaos: raw enough to feel dangerous, polished enough to feel inevitable. Frida Claeson Johansson's mastering deserves its own mention — the track breathes and presses simultaneously, as if the song itself is alive and slightly annoyed about it.
Di Porto Rosa's voice is the great unsettling force at the centre of all this. One moment feral, cornered, the kind of vocal delivery that makes you check whether the windows are locked — and then, without warning, it dissolves into something closer to a murmur, a stoned transmission from somewhere several atmospheres above ordinary human concern. Nic Nikita, his bandmate, has called him "the man with a thousand voices," and it's not hyperbole. It's field observation. The vocal performance here shifts registers the way weather shifts over the North Atlantic: suddenly, violently, and with complete indifference to your plans.
Nikita's synthesizer work deserves equal billing. The press kit invokes Angelo Badalamenti and Twin Peaks, and while the comparison might seem self-aggrandising from anyone else, the claim holds up under scrutiny. The synths don't merely accompany the song — they haunt it, lurking beneath the guitars like something half-remembered from a dream you'd rather not revisit. They provide not atmosphere so much as *pressure*, a sustained psychic weight that makes the listening experience feel like standing too close to something important and slightly radioactive.
The chorus, when it arrives, is a communal event. Voices multiply, guitars stack into a proper wall of noise, and the titular chant — *bring all your lovers* — takes on the quality of a ritual invocation rather than a pop hook. This is music designed to be screamed by thousands of people who've lost track of why they started screaming. The best rock and roll always is.
Lyrically, the song moves through images of media spectacle, violence, cosmic fire, and spiritual paradox without ever settling long enough to be pinned down. This is deliberate and intelligent — di Porto Rosa understands that the most powerful lyrical statements work through accumulation and collision, not exposition. You don't parse *Bring All Your Lovers* so much as absorb it, the way you absorb a fever or a particularly vivid argument.
The music video amplifies all of this with admirable commitment. Where lesser acts reach for literal interpretation, The Essence of The Universe reach for tone — visual and sonic registers locked together in a kind of productive dissonance. The cover artwork, a watercolour by Maja Malmqvist depicting three female figures rendered in loose, dreamlike brushstrokes of crimson, slate, and gold, suggests the same sensibility: figurative but not literal, beautiful but not comfortable.
Comparisons will inevitably be made — the primordial thud of prime Stooges, the lysergic architectures of early Spiritualized, the confrontational theatre of The Birthday Party. All of these references float somewhere in the DNA of *Bring All Your Lovers*, but none of them quite account for it. The Essence of The Universe have arrived at something that feels genuinely their own: psychedelic rock stripped of nostalgia and smugness, rebuilt from first principles by people who appear to have very little interest in being liked and every interest in being heard.
The B-side, *Heartbeat*, remains unheard at time of writing, but based on the evidence of the lead track, expectations should be calibrated accordingly — which is to say, high.
The band refuses to perform live. The band refuses to explain themselves. The band refuses to comment. One suspects they are entirely correct to do all three. Some things arrive more powerfully from the dark, and *Bring All Your Lovers* — ferocious, hypnotic, deeply strange — is one of them.
**Out now on Spacewaste Rekords.**