Media Puzzle refuses to beat a dead horse.
Their latest album is something anxious, twitching, and very much alive. Straight out of the amniotic sac, New Racehorse captures that sense of wobbling on treacherous ground, afraid your legs might give way beneath you. Nervous energy drives the album, building a propulsive momentum that reflects the restlessness of modern life itself: Instinct over Algorithm, Body over Machine.
Created on the lands of the Widjabul Wia-bal people of the Bundjalung nation, Media Puzzle’s 4th album marks a deliberate departure from their more sonically distorted scuzz-pop roots. Lines like “Drug me up, and put me down / There’s a New Racehorse in town!” promise rupture and rebirth. There are still echoes of the absurdism, humour and high-energy of the band’s earlier releases, but rather than repeating that same sound, they refine it. Textures stretch and thicken, trumpet lines weave through guitar and vocal melodies, and increasingly esoteric samples are added to the mix. New Racehorse comes to embody the strange, pulsating nature of art/post-punk.
Part of what makes the album so compelling are the flips between satirical jabs and sudden moments of emotional clarity. That oscillation between humour and discomfort forced me to sit with my own existential misgivings in a way that felt agonisingly direct. Most of the album fails the ‘Does the Dog Die?’ test so prepare to relive the death of your beloved childhood pet on track 9, “See You There”. Lead singer, Tom Peter, captures a sense of weary resignation. “Out of the Rain”, recalls the strangely hypnotic sound of the downpour when Cyclone Alfred, passed over his home in the Northern Rivers.
Clouds filling, the waters dripping
And I’m tryna get out of the rain!
It’s just another, just another day
Tryna get out of the rain!
Clouds filling, the waters dripping
I’m still tryna get out of the rain!
Elsewhere, that tension will fracture into something more erratic and nonsensical, as in track 7, “My Age in Minutes and Seconds,” where the band casts aspersions on your personal ratio of “baskets to eggs”.
Ultimately, New Racehorse is exciting because it doesn’t settle. It moves between poignancy, chaos, humour, and unease both lyrically and instrumentally. It revels in its surreal commentary and doesn’t pretend to offer a clean resolution.
Words by Hannah Rose