Projector
Since emerging from Brighton’s underground, PROJECTOR have built a reputation on friction: frenzied brutalism colliding with lush harmonies, twitching post-punk offset by an austerely romantic streak. Their 2024 debut, Now When We Talk It’s Violence (Venn Records), positioned them as sharp-tongued outsiders, funnelling Joy Division’s stark intensity through the jagged immediacy of Pixies, into something both serrated and strangely melodic.
Their second album, Contempt (Alcopop! Records, 2025), deepens that duality. Inspired in part by Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, it channels French New Wave detachment, Dadaism and the absurdity of Irish modernism. The result is a difficult, angry, yet strangely hopeful statement. Recorded largely live in one room with producer Ben Hampson (DITZ, Nadine Shah, Lambrini Girls), the record balances self-disgust with vulnerability, spiky art-rock and shoegaze melancholy with grandiose, apocalyptic lyricism. If the debut was a warning shot, Contempt is PROJECTOR embracing their role as provocative misfits, bemused in the wreckage. Fans of Sorry and Fontaines D.C. will recognise an abrasive moodiness and cold romance, while European shows alongside DITZ, Swim School and Cleopatrick hint at a chaotic live energy that finds strange appeal from diverse audiences.
In PROJECTOR, references to Yeats and Greek myth sit comfortably beside obscure football references and the kind of grotesquely imaginative auto-eroticism only found in Bleach-era Nirvana, underscoring a band who thrive on contradiction: alienation and humour, vomit and beauty.
(UK)
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