Artillery Saints’ aka Ally McKenzie,”Control & The Cousins” sits in a lineage that includes The Kinks’ “Dead End Street,” Pulp’s “Common People,” and LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge”—songs that chronicled music industry dysfunction with varying degrees of bitterness. McKenzie drains his version of any lingering romanticism. This is the lead single from Artillery Saints’ forthcoming album Glimpse, and it treats artistic ambition like something you catch in badly-lit venues at 2am.

The Aberdeen musician played in ’90s indie act Fly and 2000s electronic project Cities People And Parks before disappearing for over a decade. Lockdown eventually pulled him back when an Epiphone guitar caught his eye in a shop window. That long absence informs everything about “Control & The Cousins.”

The bassline does the heavy lifting. When the synthesizers finally appear, they’re spare and cold, little flickers of sound that suggest surveillance cameras or dying neon. The arrangement operates on deprivation theory—give the listener almost nothing, make them lean in to catch the details. Those guitar bursts hit like panic attacks.

Artillery Saints’ clearly absorbed his post-punk history—Magazine’s jagged edges, Wire’s geometric precision—but he’s filtered it through bedroom electronic production until it sounds both retro and futuristic. Artillery Saints positions itself in opposition to algorithm-friendly accessibility. This is difficult pop, pop that makes you work for it, pop that withholds satisfaction as strategy.

Artillery Saints’ betting that some audience exists for music this prickly and uncompromising, and “Control & The Cousins” makes that bet pay off.

The single announces Artillery Saints as a project operating at the intersection of ambition and exhaustion, making beauty from bitterness, finding dark comedy in collapsed dreams. McKenzie came back to music with nothing to prove and everything to say. “Control & The Cousins” is the sound of that freedom: cold, precise, unsparing, occasionally gorgeous, always true to its misanthropic vision.

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