Pont Du Hawk’s Higher Forces comes out of San Francisco like a club record beamed through a military transmitter orbiting some dead moon, ten instrumental tracks of dark electronic dance music with a hard eye on the body and a colder one on the cosmos. Rex Arcadia, working alone in Bitwig Studio, has built a debut that understands the old body-machine pact.
The concept – subjugation by extra-dimensional entities, malevolent psychic forces, a dystopian machine-future, control, deception, and redemption – opens another sealed chamber between each song: chrome doors, sterile light, voices from the vents, a console flashing instructions in a language halfway between prayer and threat. The celestial bend gives the album its character. These are not merely songs about machines; they feel like machines trying to contact something above them.
A Severed Heads influence comes through in attitude: that willingness to let melody wobble, distort, and turn slightly grotesque while the machinery keeps smiling. The synth lines have hooks, but they also have burrs under the skin, little wrong-way bends and queasy phrases that make the tracks feel alive in a synthetic, lab-grown sense. You can hear the pleasure Arcadia takes in treating electronic pop as a misbehaving organism, something bright enough to lure you closer and strange enough to make you regret leaning in.
From Intermix and Front Line Assembly, Higher Forces borrows its sense of propulsion and pressure. The drums carry that industrial-dance discipline, clipped and forward, less rock muscle than programmed enforcement. Patterns lock into place with the patience of a factory arm, while the bass sequences move with blunt authority. Yet Arcadia avoids turning the album into a gray metal corridor. He keeps planting lead melodies above the impact, and that gives the record lift: a cold ascension, as if the dance floor were being raised toward a hostile sky. A Depeche Mode thread is evident in the dramatic chord shifts and the taste for sleek menace, especially when the tracks widen out and let the synths bloom around the beat. Arcadia also seems drawn to the way Depeche Mode could make technology feel devotional, erotic, and punitive all at once.
Cabaret Voltaire and Fad Gadget haunt the album’s more abrasive instincts. The sampled voices come chopped, processed, and spat back into the mix until speech loses its social function and becomes evidence: a command, a warning, a transmission from a bad room. At points, the voices feel regurgitated into musique concrète, robotic and mangled, creating a deliciously paranoid grain. It is dance music with fluorescent tubes buzzing over an interrogation chair.
Kraftwerk’s technopop ghost appears in the album’s faith in repetition, in the idea that a simple pattern can become uncanny through discipline. John Carpenter is present in the leaner passages, where a few notes can suggest pursuit, empty streets, institutional dread, or the moment in an 80s thriller when someone realizes the phone line has been cut. S U R V I V E comes through in the wider synth architecture, the sense of glowing dread stretched across the horizon. Buzz Kull, Rue Oberkampf, and Kontravoid can be felt in the club-facing attack, where dark electronics become physical without losing their stylish, alien poise.
Theatre In Berlin and Darkside in particular sit at the center of that tension. Both feel built for 80s psychological cinema: the arpeggios stalk rather than decorate. The drums push like machinery with a destination. The melodies carry a strange euphoria, the kind that makes a person dance harder because the emergency siren has already started and no one wants to be the first to admit it.
Self-produced and self-mastered, Higher Forces has the wired charm of obsession disciplined into form. It wants bodies moving, but it also wants the mind cornered, scanned, and tampered with. That tension gives the album its charge: dance music for people who suspect the stars are watching, and that the stars are taking notes.
Listen to Higher Forces below and order the album here.
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