Lady Neptune

Lady Neptune

Noz

Night School

Six face-melting gurners for the 21st Century’s, wilted and jilted generation. Glasgow’s Lady Neptune follows her New Gorbals Gabber cassette EP with her debut vinyl release NOZ. Over the course of 23 bloody fisted minutes, Lady Neptune’s—aka Moema—hyper destructed take on Gabber and Happy Hardcore breaks down the genre tropes before rebuilding them as a new pop music. If 2020’s New Gorbals Gabber showed an artist building their own language from fragments of different genres, 2022’s NOZ goes harder into the cyberpunk-ass future and takes no prisoners. Recorded and mixed at Glasgow’s legendary Green Door Studios and mastered by Rashad Becker, here Lady Neptune evolves into a monster. With the classic weapons of Dutch Gabber—distorted 909 kick drums, bursts of noise and world-eating Rave-O[1]Matic hoovering synth riffs, Lady Neptune’s 6 tracks constantly threaten to careen off the speaker into the sweatiest, most gibbering, messy corners of the club. The two years since her debut has seen Meade destroying festival dancefloors, training for the full assault that is NOZ. Live performances have seen foam guns, tequila pistols, neon stage dancers and a full, maxed-out orgy of fast-as-hell BPM, rave music burning up the cones. The experience reaps rewards from the outset on recorded form here.

Lady Neptune

New Gorbals Gabber

Night School

Lady Neptune is a state of euphoria. Lady Neptune isn’t real, Lady Neptune is a reality. Originally formulated in London as a performing alter-ego for nascent singer-songwriter and fashion student Moema Meade, Lady Neptune has been an ongoing work that has evolved from distorted guitar dirges, bass-heavy synth pop music into its current Hi NRG 4am experimental Gabber nadir. New Gorbals Gabber is monstrous and glorious. Informed by goblinzed cave dwelling nu metal aesthetics, cheap ‘n’ nasty instrumentation but above all, peeking like an elvin proboscis around the corner of your mind, is an unstoppable knack for hooks that elevates these compositions to channels for new planes of ecstasy. Mostly performed live using an Electribe sampler/sequencer with synths, New Gorbals Gabber feels like a live recording at the rave in the final circle of Dante’s Inferno. How much fun does that sound? We’re talking Lucifer’s Manumission, Hanger 666. Meade-as-Neptune is an impish presence, Jekyll and Hyding from dirt-eating goblin to glacial pop supernova Number 1 Angel. Revolution’s bass riff and obscure crowd samples build with a arpeggiated bass synth that swirls around the Hardcore beat, threatening a Bloody Fist-style production yet staying within a dub sound world, heavy delays fading out into the first Pop moment. Twizt introduces Lady Neptune’s vocal processing technique and an unashamed, massive trance synth riff that reeks of foam parties and festivals no one pays into. It falls into Number 1, which borrows from PC Music tropes for a breakneck treatise on self-confidence. It feels...