The Manchester-born, Brussels-shaped Giulio Erasmus plays with time, space, era, and the words that weave it all together. After two solo records released on Mangel Records & Absolute Fiction (plus a freshly unveiled live album from Meakusma 2024), he now - joined by the quintet The End of The Worm - presents his new offering: Hard Sell. A redigestion of forty years of underground English culture, collided by the urgency and freedom of Brussels' new wave; Hard Sell is an exploration led by a bassline that acts like a compass - around which swirl whispers, cut-ups, abstractions, percussion bursts and sudden clearings. Together they shape a quiet narration, murmuring possible futures, indifferent to any of their consent. Sloping like a jello tower block - open the bellows!! His laconic oration cuts through gauzy pigment canopy over dissolute scenes, precisely shipwrecked. For a unit so put together, Giulio Erasmus and his End of the Worm band do the do exquisitely dismantled. Standing lean and lugubrious in what is no less than the direct continuation of the hallowed Factory-Benelux-connection lineage, here the instantly recognisable sinister-yet-seductive basslines and suavely disaffected voice of Erasmus himself run like a diverted river through an earthen channel taking in mysterious and revelatory scenes, buoyant rhythms and 80s noir phosphorescence cloaking the resultant tableaux in a lurid atmosphere that could just as easily be primal dusk as polluted canalside lamplight. All threads trace muted affect, a sense of desire under anaesthesia, a nocturnal music of blunted hooks which posits vague statements with chemical certainty that fall apart choreographed. There’s even a story concerning a young man’s tragic death-by-falling-mattress recited in splendid Cymraeg by an unidentified Gog! With an assembly of Euro weirdos at the helm, a cowbell-heavy Slow Scan ripple of espionage Echo-plexoid shadow-jams illuminated in the violet thrum of the Chorusflange glow carry Giulio’s hypnagogic intonations and the band’s creaking synthetic flourishes at a pace and posture which lurches sandy eyed, a dubby somnambulist suite stumbling under heavy manners between gloomy vignettes each decoding a message which continually slips through one’s grasp, last words whispered in a post-coital hiss in a patina’d dream of a sunken midnight lounge.