Album Review: CHALK - 'Crystalpunk'
You only get one shot at your debut album, so you may as well make it count. When CHALK turned their attention toward theirs last year, they were driven by a manifesto that ‘this would be the only CHALK album to ever exist’. This is not some Manic Street Preachers-esque ‘sell a million copies and go out in a blaze of glory’ tongue-in-cheek statement (the gulf between the 1992 and 2026 artistic landscape notwithstanding); this is intentionality. The Belfast duo of Ross Cullen and Ben Goddard have poured everything they have into this record. ‘Full send it and let the results speak for themselves. It’ll be a blessing if we follow this up.’ Yet this project is far more than a deliberate one-and-done.
They’ve been figuring themselves out since 2019 via their Conditions EP trilogy and raucous live sets, among which have been support slots for IDLES, Sprints and And So I Watch You From Afar. Since Cullen (vocals) and Goddard (multi-instrumentalist) have made the jump to headliner status, they’ve levelled up their studio craft to match, their pitch-black industrial-electronic-post-punk hybrid taken to statement levels, in spite of a personnel change.
Former drummer Luke Niblock departed last year (and has co-write credits on three of the new batch), with kit duties split between Chris W Ryan and new touring drummer Fiontan McAleavy. They both understood the assignment; McAleavy introduces himself with aplomb as Crystalpunk kicks the door down with the frantic intensity of ‘Tongue’, in a manner that’ll seem a logical progression from the more punishing output from the trilogy.
It's a short, sharp shock that lives up to that smash-and-grab manifesto, yet also introduces a more pointed, personal outlook that snaps into focus on ‘Can’t Feel It’, as Cullen recounts a fleeting childhood encounter with a close male friend and the resulting aftershocks, not to mention the nostalgia attached. An emotional bloodletting that still goes hard as hell, it sets up the exploration of loss and generational trauma on ‘One-Nine-Eight-Zero’, a glimpse into the bruised and bleeding heart of the record which is fully exposed on ‘Béal Feirste’, the Irish name for the pair’s home city.
Shot through with resilience and its mantra-like calls for togetherness, standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ in defiance of the city’s war-torn and chequered history, flipping the atmospheric outro of lead single and boisterous clarion call ‘I.D.C.’ on its head before pounding four-on-the-floor rhythms crash in and a love letter to the Belfast electronic scene unfolds. Rather than give it an ‘extended mix’ tag and stash it away on the B-side of a 12” single, the full eight minutes is presented here as the album’s penultimate track. “Keep on going, keep on going, keep on going” Cullen exhorts, as the song oscillates wildly between moments of calm and absolute mayhem. Made for the mosh pit and the dancefloor both, the blood of the Troubles, the struggles and the city’s resurgence running through every second.
It’s a thrilling high point on an album full of emotional peaks and troughs. ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Skem’ pair up for the iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove treatment, a moment of pained reflection leading into a battering-ram quasi-instrumental that dials up the panicked ferocity of the record’s darker cuts to 11. It’s the sound of CHALK cutting loose and stepping into themselves, which they also do in a completely different way on ‘Longer’, calling back to the push and pull of ‘Conditions’ and ‘Pool Scene’ for a riff-driven juggernaut that sounds like it’s going to go down a storm in a live setting.
At the other end of the scale, a harrowing sense of loss hangs over ‘Ache’, presented as a coda to ‘Béal Feirste’ with the same two-chord blueprint, yet taken in a radically different direction as it provides one final emotional release that lingers long in the memory as the album draws to a close with a drone that serves as a drawn-out scream of catharsis. It’s a raw and unflinching way to bring down the curtain on an album like this, a depth of feeling to be found in a record that starts in such a menacing manner but whose façade crumbles two songs in. Cullen and Goddard allow themselves to feel it all, to not feel it in turn, to do it all because this could be their only shot. The resulting record is a tear-stained triumph, packed with ambition, heart and the kind of songs that will surely light up sticky venue floors anywhere. It’s been a long seven years to get here, but CHALK have finally arrived; today Belfast, tomorrow the world.
Words by Gareth O'Malley
