The music of the newly re-branded Kinsella & Pulse, LLC—previous albums by the duo were released as Good Fuck and simply Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse—contains some of the most forward-thinking postmodern pop of the past decade. Their latest, Open ing Night, follows 2023’s acclaimed Giddy Skelter and delivers a tantalizing left turn that finds the maverick experimentalists’ restless imaginations and formidable skills undiminished.

While the meticulously crafted audio mosaic Giddy Skelter showcased the duo’s innovative production and skillful sound design, Open ing Night offers listeners a more natural perspective. The fruits of this strategy can be heard, in particular, throughout the entire first half of Open ing Night, a five-part suite recorded in one uninterrupted take that plays more like a well-curated DJ set than a traditional album side.

Kinsella & Pulse, LLC arrived at this approach following four months of touring across the US and the UK abetted by multi-instrumentalist Theo Katsaounis, who had performed alongside Kinsella in Joan of Arc. Fresh from the road, the band de-camped to Sudestudio studios in southern Italy, taking full advantage of the studio’s collection of vintage gear and instruments.

Upon returning to their hometown of Chicago, the band reconnected with longtime collaborator Cooper Crain at the famed Electrical Audio to record additional tunes for the album and add overdubs to the Sudestudio tracks, inventively using the studio to pay homage to Steve Albini’s iconic drum sound by re-amping their Roland drum machines through speakers.

The band’s self-effacing description of their approach on Open ing Night is “anti-production,” but this is somewhat misleading. While their decision to foreground performance over production is clearly audible, the duo’s irreverent approach remains more KLF than Carole Kaye.

The album opens with “Sally,” which places Pulse’s captivating vocals front and center. Pulse has referred to the band’s current sound as “Chicago post-rave desert art-pop,” and this opening cut leaves one to assume that the “desert” to which she refers is some 8000 miles east of California, evoking as it does the tantric, tube-rattling trance blues of Tinariwen.

This sets the tone for the remainder of the record and serves as an ideal introduction to the singular m.o. of Kinsella & Pulse, LLC. Though faithful to the legacy of left-field pop, Kinsella and Pulse consistently add just the right amount of knotty tension and dubwise dissonance to what are essentially alternate reality chart-toppers.

Even the central conceit of “Love”—surely one of pop music’s fundamental subjects—is given a sassy, cosmopolitan sheen that manages the feat of making a paean to desire sound novel.

Throughout Open ing Night, songs move in unexpected directions, with hairpin, almost prog-like jump-cuts into breakbeats, field recordings, and studio chatter. Elsewhere, cathartic,

Fugazi-worthy anthems collide with vintage Farfisas and 808s, and long outros disintegrate into interludes like the brief but bracing “Brutal”, which sounds a bit like Kevin Drumm deconstructing Konono No.1. This segues, improbably, into “Watch and See,” which begins like the band is about to dive headfirst into a cover of INXS’s “Need You Tonight.”

It would be an oversight to neglect mentioning Kinsella and Pulse’s evocative lyrics. Kinsella, in particular—the author of several novels—is rightfully celebrated as one of the most talented

and original wordsmiths to emerge from the 90s DIY punk scene, and on songs like “Cracked Factory Wall”—the finest song to ever namecheck doomed actor John Cazale—he expertly wields descriptive language to paint vivid, dreamlike scenarios:

“You appeared like the word ‘yes,’ sculpted in glass and pumped full of smoke… You appeared like a life-saving joke: timed just right, and not too funny.”

Of course, this being a band of irreverent punk rock lifers, it’s not all Pushcart prize-bait: refreshingly, Kinsella and Pulse also instinctually know when to cut to the chase, as when Kinsella nonchalantly sings, in one of the record’s many delightful “did-I-hear-that-right?” moments, “I fuckin’ hate my dad.”

Open ing Night is the sound of three decades of post punk, underground dance music, and the

avant-garde culminating in a singular vision of smart, mutant pop, adding to a continuum that runs from Davids Bowie and Sylvian all the way to Shudder To Think and Gang Gang Dance. Imagine if SST-era Sonic Youth had been influenced less by Glenn Branca and the Ramones than by Juan Atkins and The Residents. Such is the intoxicating and irresistible duality of Kinsella & Pulse, LLC, who, with Open ing Night, deliver their finest work to date.

—James Toth