Exit Electrionics — Learn The Hard Way

Exit Electronics is the rawer ‘n’ noise-bound solo project of Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, JK Flesh, Jesu, Final). Learn The Hard Way is the project's debut album, which originally appeared back in 2022 on Broadrick’s own Avalanche Recordings label. Here from Zoharum is a CD reissue of the album, and what we get is eleven tracks worth of crude bone-battering electro beats &  skin scalding to roasting electronics. 

The CD is presented in a four-panel dull black and blue static ribbed digipak- with the front cover taking in a black and white TV screen full of a seething mass of black ‘n’ grey static. The digipak is ltd to 400 copies.

It’s fair to say that though-out Learn The Hard Way very much fit’s its title- as each of the eleven tracks is equally battering, crude, and unrelenting- with things usually getting more seared & corrupted as they go along. The CD features the original album's eight tracks plus two bonus tracks- which really follow a similar suit. With the track lengths between two and five minutes.

We open with the bluntly fuzzed bass line, chopping-to-scuttling beats, and building noise haze of “Tough Love”. Moving onto swarming buzz meets battering beat attack of “No Mark”. There’s baying dark future feedback atmospherics, malefaction electro texturing, and on-off primal beat hiss ‘n’ chop of “Never Again”.

In the album's second half, we go from the wound-down techno pulse and muffled noise haze of “Doing It Wrong”. Onto blown-out industrial, blunt bass purr, and muddled beat chop ‘n’ slice of “Worlds Wide Waste”.Through to drawn-out bass slug, hiss ‘n’ forking percussion, and general airless weight on the bonus track “Expelled Like Piss”.

Learn The Hard Way is certainly one of the more nasty & downright primal electro-beat-based albums you’ll ever have heard. Dance music for a black smoke choked & circuitry-falling future- where there is zero hope, only relentless beat chop & noise corruption.