Skip to content
Enzyme: Golden Dystopian Age 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus) Surely every punk with a social media account knows Enzyme just completed a triumphant North American tour. These Aussies are so damn cool-looking and photogenic that the algorithm loves them, and I feel like I saw classic-looking photos of their live antics daily while they were here. While the attention on Enzyme’s live show is deserved (they slayed at the date I caught in Richmond), I haven’t seen as much chatter about how fucking great their new album is. Seriously, Golden Dystopian Age is a face-melter, intense yet mind-bending, and with hooks! Enzyme’s sound takes a lot from the Confuse / Gai family tree, and that style can go either way for me… bands who add little to the formula are a dime a dozen, but there are bands like Lebenden Toten and D-Clone who make that sound the foundation of some of the most innovatively warped music in the entire underground. Ezyme belongs in the latter category… across Golden Dystopian Age you’ll not only hear a wide range of different distortion tones and textures, you’ll also get disco beats, electronic sequencer rhythms, and epic intros and outros. You never know what crazy sound will come at you next, and the wildness of it is so over the top I grin with delight when I listen. For all its progressiveness, though, it never feels like Enzyme is forcing you to listen to “experiments…” the songs are packed with hooks, with memorable moments like the wild drum pattern in “Chewing the Fat,” the infusion of disco in “Masquerade,” and the chanted choruses, which feel as firmly lodged in my brain as classic Steve Ignorant diatribes. Golden Dystopian Age is highly compressed, jamming so many ideas into its brief fourteen minutes it feels like it’s bursting with creativity. Its brevity also makes it extremely replayable, which only makes the hooks sink in deeper. Far more than just a souvenir from a memorable tour, Golden Dystopian Age should go down as one of punk’s most exciting triumphs of 2023.