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Lex Viscera Builds a Nightclub at the End of Time on "Anachronism"
- SoundCheck Team
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The Eastern European electro-pop artist Lex Viscera's new record Anachronism lives right where the club meets a spaceship, and it’s stranger and better for it.
Article Contributed by Devin McDevitt & Rebecca McDevitt
Some records make you pick a lane. Anachronism refuses to let you. You can put this thing on and hear two completely different albums at the same time. One second it’s like club music, all body, heat and eyes on you. The next it’s like a spaceship, cold, cinematic and pulling you somewhere far away. Both reads are correct. That’s the entire point.
Lex Viscera has spent the last few years carving out a dark, distinctly his own corner of electro-pop, but Anachronism feels like the moment that world fully comes alive.
The record pulls together the sensuality, darkness, atmosphere, and futuristic edge that have been showing up throughout his work, turning them into something that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a place you can actually step into. He has described the album as being about time, vulnerability, and the urgency of holding onto something right before it slips away, and the title says it out loud. An anachronism is something out of its proper moment, and that is exactly how the album feels. Sensuality and futurism exist in the same breath, while a memory and a premonition seem to play out at once.
"Fixation" is where he lays his cards on the table. "I can be the fixation" is a come-on, sure, but a knowing one, delivered like he is watching you watch him. It is hot and a little unsettling and you cannot look away, which, yeah, that is the idea.
The interludes are the secret weapon here. Short passages, a minute to ninety seconds each, guiding you from one full track into the next. They work like scene changes, or maybe wormholes, and they are the reason the album plays as one continuous world instead of a stack of singles.
It’s like a film you’re moving through in real time.
Then there is "waveslikedejavu," one word, no spaces, and the beating heart of the whole thing. It’s genuine dance music, it wants your body, but it plays like you got dropped into the middle of a movie. Think the eerie science-fiction side of Stranger Things crashing straight into a club at 2 a.m. When the hook lands, "waves like deja vu, wash all over you," the déjà vu is the thesis. Déjà vu is time folding over on itself, the past showing up somewhere it does not belong. Picture the Stranger Things kids in the year 2550, running from something with far too many teeth, and this is what plays over the chase. Terror and euphoria on the same beat.
"Summoning" is where the underbelly shows. It opens sounding almost like someone going under water, that muffled panic of drowning, before it surfaces into a creepy, crawling synth. And that is where the other half of this record clicks into focus. Underneath all the future-club sheen, something ritual is happening. Something witchy.
Long stretches of Anachronism stop feeling like verses and choruses and start feeling like chanting, like an incantation you’re not totally sure you should be repeating out loud.
That is the magic trick. Desire and time, and Lex will not hand you either one clean. The body and the machine. The club and the cosmos. The séance and the dance floor. It should not hold together, and it absolutely does. You can play it twice and hear two different albums, and both times you were paying attention.
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