Veik sign to Fuzz Club for their debut album and share the first single

French three-piece Veik have released ‘Difficult Machinery’ and announced their debut album ‘Surrounding Structures’, due for release April 30th. Centred around vintage analogue synths and abrasive instrumentation, the band’s experimental post-punk is rooted in the 70s avant-garde, most notably Krautrock and No Wave. They reel off groups like Implog, Suicide or Indoor Life as inspirations, whilst existing in a similar world to contemporaries like Beak, Suuns and Girl Band. You can stream ‘Difficult Machinery’ below and pre-order 'Surrounding Structures' on vinyl here (this record is April's Fuzz Club Membership LP)

Listening to their music, it’s quickly clear how the disjointed shapes and abrasive textures of brutalist architecture are manifested in their music. However, they claim that the ‘Surrounding Structures’ of the album’s title are also a reference to both the “physical and social structures that surround us, and how they shape us as individuals and collectives. It’s not a political album per se, but a way to address that question from different scales of observation, by telling stories and by integrating our own experiences and reflections into our sound.” 

On the first single and album-opener ‘Difficult Machinery’ – a detached proto-punk drone nodding to Faust by way of The Velvet Underground – we find a perfect example of the band using personal experience to wax philosophical. The lyrics coming to drummer and vocalist Boris Collet after watching his dad ill in a hospital bed: “Seeing him weakened and plugged into banks of machines through cables that radiated from his body was a weird experience. This concept of ‘difficult machinery’ made sense to emphasise the mind-body dualism through the metaphor of the body as a machine.”