At what point does the sound of the future become the sound of the now? Last month we got hip to the noir-pop of 0171 and the London duo’s shock-current single “Photograph,” an instant entry into SOTY conversations, branded across the internet as futuristic pop. This past Friday (August 14), producers/vocalists Joe Bedell-Brill and Georgie Hoare hit us with their new EP, titled Change Nothing, and it’s a five-track romp though the moods of the modern day, buoyed by ultra-slick production and a cracking batch of melodic, R&B-tinged electronic-pop.
The complexities around the EP center around themes of stasis, the gravitational weight of society’s ills, and our own attempts to let go of the negative and trying to live our lives when life has been placed on the back-burner. The record is led its venomously seductive opening track “Automatic,” the aforementioned “Photograph,” and the title track.
“’Change Nothing’ is a song for the times you sit staring at a wall, and see days stretched out in an uninspiring line,” 0171 declare. “But, as with all our music, there’s a kind of defiance in it as well. It’s you and me versus the sadness. It’s you at my side, trying to keep our heads up. The sound is aggressive — the message is not about giving up, it’s about shouting in the darkness.”
Absorb it all below.