The Reels and Shorts have soothed and smoothed brain lining to resemble top of a well-licked icecream cone. Have a recent, worrying, very self-diagnosed heart condition that is likely a result of chronic cone-brained boredom and reading substack. Illawarra’s latest album is a revelling in the savage reservation, the sorta thing that only makes sense when held up against Channel 7 played at half speed. Alpha plus listeners will not understand as they don’t decry the end of the world so much as voicing a lack of feeling amidst it all. Helpless, spasming, no one is coming, the bars solid, island abandoned, ship sunk, fire billowing. It smells of cigarettes. I listened to ‘On Battery’ deep into some acid and can report that it is soothing and pleasurable in the sense that it is really real and figuring itself out like anyone else. We’re in no hurry, can just breathe and imagine all the corrosion occurring and heartbeats stopping. Feel assured in decay. Illawarra Most Wanted knows you are not far behind, this is the sound of (y)our death in real-time, of industrial lathes being washed away by the flood, highways cracking under a century of neglect, mushrooms eating couches, people turned cadavers turned bones turned soil minerals. Their sophomore album continues to dig with barehands at the grounds of emoviolence, being far weirder, noisier and inwards-facing than most who tread the well-worn paths of skramz or experimental music.