With Optic Sink, Natalie Hoffmann (NOTS) creates a musical paradox: an endeavor that doesn’t really seem to belong to any particular time or place, constructed with sounds that are synthesized and stripped-down, yet bristling with urgency and brutalist emotion.

Written over a two-year period, the eight songs that comprise Optic Sink S/T sound like they should’ve been recorded in a bathysphere or on a space station—instead, they were captured via analog tape at Andrew McCalla’s Bunker Audio studio in summer 2019. Ben Bauermeister’s (Magic Kids, A55 Conducta) inventive aux percussion and drum machine work provides the backdrop, while Hoffmann stokes a proverbial furnace in the foreground, dryly revisiting and repeating words and phrases until they’re imbued with portent. Hoffmann’s synthesizers add texture with growls and shrieks, often mutating danceable rhythms into shimmering walls of sound. These are fully defined, atmospheric collages crafted with plenty of room for Hoffmann to play and test an artillery of sounds.

Optic Sink defy categories, shape-shifting from cold wave to psychedelia to distorted noise rock. In the process—which frequently occurs in a single song—Optic Sink claim unchartered territory as they cathartically fragment and reassemble sounds, concepts, and verbal constructs.