The Mortal Prophets are back with "Under The Influence", a five-track EP that doesn't pay homage to its influences; it questions them. The release lasts a tight 16 minutes and 19 seconds and is like a controlled explosion of songs that quietly changed the band's creative DNA. What comes out is not memories but something alive and evolving, influence considered raw material rather than a holy book.
"Under The Influence" deconstructs, stresses, and reassembles well-known pieces through a series of sound battles. Each track brings together different times into a single tense present, creating a conversation that feels more urgent than looking back. The Mortal Prophets don't keep the originals in amber, instead, they cut off their nervous systems and put them back together in strange, often scary ways.
The EP starts with Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," which is an ambient elegy with its once-sunny expansiveness turned inward. Without the grandness, the song becomes quiet, fragile, and deeply personal, more of an afterimage than an anthem. Brian Eno's "Third Uncle," which was already a proto-punk outlier, is pushed even further into the red and turned into a serrated, post-industrial sprint that is about to fall apart.
The descent continues with "Sister Midnight," which goes even deeper into Iggy Pop's Berlin-era nighttime paranoia, ratcheting the tension even higher. David Bowie's "Repetition" is even shorter than the original. It becomes a claustrophobic pulse study where minimalism becomes stifling. The last song, "Too Many Creeps," brings back Bush Tetras' downtown menace as a broken apparition, with jagged basslines, urban dread, and nervous energy colliding at sharp angles.
Founder John Beckmann says the project was like bringing these songs into the lab and seeing what happened when their binaries broke apart. The EP's core is based on that philosophy. "Under The Influence" views influence as a dynamic entity that requires constant challenge to maintain its significance. The Mortal Prophets remind us that inheritance is not set in stone with this release. "Under The Influence" is a strong, direct statement, the past only matters if you're willing to break it open.
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