Much ado about the Midwest is well due given given that it often takes those from the outskirts to mine their own individual undergrounds without letting the blase of metropolitan trends interfere with impressing on their creative pastures. Cincinnati’s The Serfs are a counter-offer to today’s background music electronic palette and the middling indie rock-traditionalism-as-punk posturing, and given its multi-instrumentalists in members Dylan McCartney (vocals, percussion, guitar, bass, electronics), Dakota Carlyle (electronics, bass, guitar, vocals) and Andie Luman (vocals, synths) are also in offshoots of psychedelic phreakmaking with the Drin, Crime of Passing and Motorbike, it’s safe to say that playing it unsafely in the underworld informs how an album like Half Eaten By Dogs merges sonic planes in mystique. “Club Deuce”, the album’s trancelike EBM-driven lead single and centerpiece led by Carlye’s whispers in the dark, is arguably a red herring highlight in their otherwise brooding, post-industrial dance floor alchemy that pulls you into its wonder of a noise bizarre equally informed by seminal home state experimental egg punks Brainiac as much as it is the glum synth austere of Joy Division and Skinny Puppy. This place the Serfs lead you into is a strange realm equally heathenistic as it heavenly — perhaps something better than considering this life in black and white terms. But so could one only be created by those building versions of this world from the fringes of the independent music scene’s epicenters.

Highlights: “Suspension Bridge Collapse”, “Beat Me Down”, “Club Deuce”

The Serfs’ Half Eaten By Dogs is available now on Trouble In Mind Records.

Buy | Stream