Blink and you might miss it. That’s how I feel today after realising AUS released a new album four months ago. Their track on the latest Flennen compilation is actually from AUS II, out on German label Static Age whom I’ve seemed to have forgotten to check in with for a while. For everyone who loved the Berlin outfit’s mini-album from 2019 as much as I did, this is a goldmine. Ten tracks of austere post-punk in the language that feels like it was invented for such musical expressions. If Schönberg was logical conclusion of industrialism, “Suchmaschine” is the tonality of the post-industrial state of surveillance capitalism.
