The Zaxons Share “Adrian Knows” Video From “Videopticons” Album

Vancouver post-punk trio The Zaxons have returned with a new video for Adrian Knows, a standout from their current album, Videopticons, that takes its name and inspiration from Adrian Mole, the painfully self-conscious teenage narrator of Sue Townsend‘s 1982 novel The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾. Adrian Knows has the precision of early post-punk but also something more physical and contemporary in its attack, tight, propulsive and catchy, but never entirely domesticated. Built around driving bass, clipped guitar lines, primitive electronics and Julian Growcott‘s coolly detached British vocal, the track lands somewhere between the angular economy of Wire and Magazine, the nervous futurism of Pete Shelley and Gary Numan, and the darker pulse of contemporary bands like Preoccupations and Women. It’s sharp, strange and immediately melodic, the kind of pop song where every hook arrives with a little exposed wiring around it.

The Zaxons make lean, restless post-punk built from rhythm first: basslines that push songs relentlessly forward, guitars that slash across rather than sit comfortably inside them, and synths that occasionally flicker into view like some obsolete machine suddenly waking up. The reference points are recognizable, but The Zaxons never settle comfortably into revivalism. This is less the 1980s remembered than the strange technological future that era imagined was just around the corner. If Videopticons exists anywhere, it might be after closing time in a British electronics shop somewhere around 1981. The televisions are still glowing, a home computer has been left running in the corner, and tomorrow looks simultaneously exciting and faintly ominous. It’s a world The Zaxons suggest rather than recreate, all clipped efficiency, malfunctioning signals and flashes of pop colour against the grey.