Following their 2017 sophomore album
Subordination, half of the members of ragged punk band
Institute left Austin for New York. Looking firsthand at wealth disparity and corporate greed in his new big-city environment, bandleader
Moses Brown began writing songs even more politically charged and anxious than the already furious
Subordination. When they last checked in,
Institute had stretched out their raw punk style into more experimental zones, injecting some songs with elements of trashy glam rock and nervous post-punk. Third album
Readjusting the Locks strips back those experimental impulses and offers a lean slab of writhing, filthy-sounding rock & roll, leaning heavily on the demented swagger of '70s proto-punk acts. The band's caustically lo-fi production bent is still in full force, with guitar tones pushing the boundaries of fuzz, and drums sounding processed through a wall of broken boom boxes. While this has been their approach for almost every record,
Readjusting the Locks feels more on the edge of combustion than ever. Still sounding like a worn cassette copy of the
Warsaw demos, the band channels
Raw Power-era
Stooges and untethered '70s punk acts like the
Adverts and the
Vibrators on swaggering tracks like "Mon Cherie."
Brown rails against banks, neo-liberal agendas, and modern updates to fascist models, striking out for blood on standout tracks like "Dazzle Paint." On "Roll Music," he assesses the pointlessness of playing music when the future looks so bleak, but he also addresses the paradox of how necessary it is to staying sane.
Readjusting the Locks is
Institute's most urgent material, and also their strongest to date. With a sharper edge than other releases, every song comes out swinging, with the combination of high-power playing and unrelenting dread making for the perfect soundtrack to an existential crisis.