Ash Code has come a long way: the Italian trio acknowledges that personal difficulties brought their adventure to an end in 2024, six years after the release of the album Perspektive. Ash Code was dead. Then, life: the birth of a child brought the band back from the ashes, giving them new energy. Synthome is therefore a testament to these difficulties, both death and rebirth. Its title refers to the idea of sinthome developed by Jacques Lacan, which, in modern psychoanalysis, describes what holds together the three circles of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic (for example, literature in James Joyce, observes Lacan). For Ash Code, the threads that now hold their existence together are synthesizers (think of the song Living for the Sound, whose title takes on its full meaning... and we understand the spelling with a “y”!).
Well, thank goodness they plugged them back in! With haunting melodies, ghostly echoes, distant vocals, and catchy rhythms, Ash Code has found the perfect formula, somewhere between synthpop and post-punk, to envelop us in melancholy and haunt us. The voices follow one another, from the more ethereal Claudia Nottebella giving way to the deep, sepulchral timbre of Alessandro Belluccio. The words seem to come from another reality, with the synths serving as a medium for communicating with tormented souls. We shiver as we savor the spooky atmosphere of Scar or the menace contained in Run in the Dark and Choke, whose EBM influences impose their intensity and nervous energy.
Death and rebirth: while Synthome feels like a haunted house lost in the fog, where you admire the dust-covered furniture while trying to grasp its memories, it also oozes with life. Hope springs forth, light blinds us, and Ash Code seems to manifest his desire to live with tracks like Dancing to the Noise and its frenetic energy. There is harshness and mourning, but also a benevolent gentleness that emanates from this ensemble. Angel Oscuro blows hot and cold, with its theatrical lamentations whispered in Spanish and bass sound straight out of northern England. Nuances, contrasts, Ash Code loses itself in poetic and romantic contemplations but also shows itself to be more direct, enriching its carefully woven melodies with a framework that is sometimes post-punk, sometimes EBM.
The album was mixed and mastered by She Past Away's Doruk Öztürkcan: these people know how to make ghosts dance. Exploring Synthome is like attending a séance during which Ash Code has laid bare their skills, both a synthesis and the apogee of their reinvigorated style. This album can be seen as both a funeral and a rebirth, the conclusion of the first part of their career, but also the solid foundations on which to build the next chapter.
