Polevaulter: Campaign Trail 
Dose Recordings
Out now
Earlier this year, noise punk duo Polevaulter released their debut album, full of throttling yet danceable bangers with dark lyrical bullets that linger like a bad cold – delivered with the wit of John Cooper Clarke but the chugging intensity of Biggie Smalls. Jon Franz and Dan Wearmouth return here with another monstrous hit of bellicose electronic and vocal gymnastics, written during, and recorded shortly after, touring the album around France.
The thrust of the new track is sparked by that very jaunt, with the typically nihilistic phrasing of the central lyric casting a brutally binary view of the music industry: “if you die on tour, you die in real life”. Once again, the way Franz butchers sayings into a new Frankenstein, that feels destined to be part of the vernacular, is properly remarkable. It’s also the way the baritone, Yorkshire-accented words are sonorously intoned, mixed in a sweet spot between the atonal air-raid electronics and cushioning reverb, that makes them so cathartic.
Campaign Trail is cut from the same cloth as their debut album’s barnstorming electronics, low-end bass, sampling, grimy synthesized snare and sardonic sung-spoken-spat punk poetry. The track glories in its primal simplicity, returning to its chorus of monotonously delivered (in the best, most hypnotic way) words and thrumming noise, inducing a similar mania to the grind of touring.
Polevaulter provide another incessantly catchy but immeasurably filthy banger with Campaign Trail.
Listen to the track here.
Find Polevaulter on social media here.
Words by James Kilkenny. Find more of his Louder Than War articles here.
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