Sydney DIY label Tenzenmen has had a great run of releases lately from a diverse span of acts including SCUL HAZZARDs, Truth From Facts and Paint Your Golden Face. This spilt EP from Sydney natives Hira Hira and Little a highlights Tenzenmen’s ear for music made in suburban warehouses, and even though ostensibly these two acts are quite different, they share some similarities. At their heart these are pop songs with hooks and melody, but it’s pop with awkward angles.

Following on from their raucous EP of last year, We. Are. All. Xray. Pricks. No. Talent. Fuck. Off, Hira Hira attempt a more contained sound with the four tracks they contribute to this EP. That might sound like a bad thing, but it’s actually refreshing to hear the quartet evolving into something more than just an Ohana-esque punk band. They’re inviting melody into their sound, aligning themselves more closely with the post-hardcore styles of At The Drive-In and Les Savy Fav. Listening to ‘All The Kids In The Basement are S.O.B.s’ is like being trapped in a washing machine, the jerky rhythms combining so effectively with the strung-out emotion of the song.

Little a (aka Amy Wilson) feels less confident in her compositions than Hira Hira, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time she’s actually recorded something properly. Like Hira Hira, her four tunes are essentially pop songs with a punk ethos, but she replaces the scratchy guitars with degraded synthesisers and 8-bit beats. ‘Clock’ is the best song she has here. The droning synths, incessant snare and Wilson’s slightly off-key vocals give it a palatable tension. It’s like hearing someone slowly going insane from isolation. “I’m so lonely when the stars come out,” she mewls. “My only friend is my radio.”

You can hear where the two outfit’s philosophies collude in their covers of each other. Hira Hira takes Little a’s synth-punk and awkward energy and rackets it up, while Little a does the complete opposite: she deconstructs Hira Hira’s ‘X-ray’ and strips everything away from it, leaving just Wilson’s voice and that familiar sense of tension that pervades everything she does. To varying degrees, both Hira Hira and Little a manage to capture the frustration and cultural isolation of suburbia on this excellent split EP.

by Dom Alessio