MSPAINT : No Separation
“If this world is falling apart, why don’t we just fall together?” This line from “Wildfire,” on MSPAINT’s brilliant new EP No Separation, asks a prescient question. How often do you open your phone and see some news that opens a trap door in the pit of your stomach? It’s hard to live like this, so what can we do to help ourselves and each other? We find shared meaning and purpose. This metamodern perspective (basically: “optimistic nihilism“) is increasingly prevalent in pop culture, see the likes of Everything Everywhere All At Once, Rick & Morty and albums by Charli XCX and Childish Gambino. All try to find meaning in the meaningless, searching for connections between the head-spinning melange of perspectives and identities that characterise our cacophonous and uncertain age.
Punk experimentalists MSPAINT ask these questions with singular fervor. There’s an argument that the recent resurgence of interest in hardcore punk is a metamodern phenomenon; think how it fuses seemingly opposite polarities like community and chaos, solidarity and violence. However, that’s for a whole other feature to pick the bones out of. Right now, we’re looking at the new five-track EP from the Hattiesburg, Mississippi four-piece. Their first release since 2023 full-length Post-American is, comfortably, one of the most exhilarating “punk” releases you’ll hear this year. “Punk” is placed in inverted commas because this is the sound of the genre ripped apart and reconstructed as a gloriously digital and dayglo-coloured new creation. In MSPAINT’s thrillingly free musical palette you can hear the likes of dance-punk, rap and experimental rock, all fighting, kissing, making up and turning their collective anger towards the minority that are ruining this glorious world.
“Wildfire” encapsulates everything great about the EP and its creators. A sub-three-minute rager that makes wonderous use of an arpeggiated synthesiser, this is one of those addictive tracks that satisfies the body and the mind and feels like it could potentially save your/the world. Dynamic vocalist Deedee’s lyrics about how “we’ve got to pick up the pieces/take a look at what’s left” are genuinely profound in and, when layered atop the forceful synth and double-hat groove, lead to a climax that makes you want to take to the street, molotov cocktail in hand, grinning ear-to-ear. MSPAINT’s determination to make music that sounds as fresh as their lyrical perspective reaps wonderous rewards. Opener “Drift” transcends genres, while closer “Angel” is another highlight; all gorgeous, colourful synths and a middle section that tilts from emo rap into a gentle digi-breakdown.
Perhaps the most brilliant thing about No Separation is that for all the bang-on-the-zeitgeist philosophical perspectives and audacious musical flourishes, it also works as a visceral and immediate experience, like all the best punk rock. It’s a scary, unknowable world right now, but hearing the intensely humanist MSPAINT make something as original but easy-to-grasp as this makes you feel like the world still makes some sort of sense.
Label: Convulse
Year: 2025
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