Curses’ Next Wave Acid Punx Reaches Its Third Volume on Eskimo

Next Wave Acid Punx TROIS!, the third volume of Curses’ series for Eskimo Recordings, is out. Its territory is specific: the stretch of electronic music where acid house, EBM, industrial and the harder end of European club sound stopped behaving like separate scenes and began bleeding into each other.

That moment has a documented history, and it is easy to sentimentalise. Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, records from Chicago and Detroit crossed with European electronics in London, Berlin and Manchester; dance music briefly worked as a shared vocabulary rather than a marketing category. The period carried a naive assumption that the future would be genuinely different. For a while it was, before the same impulses were processed into chart fodder and advertising soundtracks.

The series’ proposition is that this history is a current, not a costume. Placing those textures in a modern context is the whole point of the format, and the framing matters more than the nostalgia it risks. Retro-electronic signifiers now circulate as style, largely detached from the conditions that produced them, which is what makes the distinction between revivalism and continuation worth arguing. Three volumes in, Next Wave Acid Punx is not asking for that era to be restored. It is saying the attitude behind it never fully left.