Immersion: What Is Lost Will Return

As the chief architects of post-punk, Wire have always existed to break boundaries. There are many examples of this. The clearest, perhaps the masculine side of punk where Colin Newman and Co. reacted to it in polar opposite fashion. Quite literally, dressing more like office workers than any by-product of some inner-city London squat.

It’s this polemic attitude that Newman has carried ever since, and really, it’s been his hallmark card. His excellent Immersion project alongside life-partner and Minimal Compact’s Malka Spigel, moving and morphing into new shapes and guises over the years. The most recent of them has seen the project as creatively fertile as it’s ever been.

Releasing two albums last year, including the excellent collaboration alongside New York ambient country favourites, SUSS, Nanocluster Vol. 3 was a gateway that led to WTF? A mediation on the state of the world. Immersion’s follow-up, What Is Lost Will Return, sees them aiming to demystify the chaos that was central on WTF? Granted, Immersion make no bones about the fact that the picture remains bleak. But as they always do, (again alongside drummer Matt Schulz), Newman and Spigel offer some alternatives in a bid to get things back on the right track.

With Spigel’s excellent body of work in Minimal Compact, together with Newman’s output in Wire during this century in particular, in many ways Immersion is the logical through-line. This new era of the project, like punk for speak easy environments as opposed to the gnarled fleapits where the genre once thrived.

It’s the embodiment of Newman and Spigel’s can do spirit. The pair, subtly sardonic, positively perceptive and deeply learned. Their adversaries, not eviscerated with tough talk, but instead killed slowly with kindness.

What Is Lost Will Return is all about possibilities, and forward-thinking ideas that aren’t jammed down your throat as a threat to comply. Instead, Newman and Spigel’s messages hang in the air for you to think about in your own time. It helps that their dream-laden kraut-rock wanderings dovetail with such thoughts, too. The term ‘sound bath’, often reserved for ambient-based music, but Immersion adopt it in the realms of punk. (Even beyond the cosmic meanderings of the album’s instrumental-based moments, Megafauna, Childsplay and Frequencies & Echoes.)

It begins with Nephology. A sing-speak trade-off where Newman provides the verses and Spigel cushions his thoughts with her ever dependable choruses. Infectious and immediate, the pair create the kind of vibe where environment and mind coalesce. A brainstorming exercise on change, where “harbingers of darkness” and “future dawns” emerge. A commentary of these times where hope offsets darkness and vice versa because, above all, Immersion are realists.

Following is Breaking Free, Diversity, Evolution. Floaty dream-punk informed by Newman’s later-era exploits in Wire. Spigel’s wordplay is knife-sharp, as each verse cuts through deeper and deeper. So illuminating, you can do nothing but nod in agreement. (“Last days and first days are just numbers / Stories invented to give meaning / System created to give order / Mapping outlines to give borders.”)

It’s a poignant indictment of this everything now culture, and it continues on We Don’t Need Your Validation and Radio Signals. Immersion throw down the gauntlet on the status quo. The hollow, online culture where attention and metrics override the art itself. A style over substance where it’s now simply too much to bear. And it’s band’s like Immersion that now feel like outliers because of it. Existing outside the paradigm, it’s this freedom where Immersion demonstrate evolution, which in their own words is the solution!

It all comes to a head on the album’s eponymous song. Newman and Spigel dispense the kind of messages that are akin to a university lecture. The key takeout? Inclusion breeds success. Their ability to thrive in brevity, something few others have matched during an era where so many have turned to lyrical acrobats to get their point across. Not Immersion, who demonstrate that less really is more. Newman, putting it best when he offers the greatest possibility of of all. “Just imagine that / Thinking outside the box”. Indeed.

What Is Lost Will Return is out now via ~ swim. Purchase here.