This is a different genre to what I normally look for, but wow, what a compelling sound!

Goblin Problem is the solo project for Cheap Sav For Dead Friends frontman Jack (great first name) Buchanan, and is NOT the same type of music at all. This is a trance-esque, slightly Moby, slightly Empire Of The Sun, somewhat Depeche Mode (any era after 1983), kind of vibe. And I like it!

Let him tell you about it: “I wrote ‘Leave It Behind”, in a Sydney Airbnb last year while nursing a particularly nasty hangover. The growling bass synth is what got me started, and suddenly the whole song just poured out of me. This track is my self-destruction dance anthem. A track that speaks to the nights when you’re determined to get totally obliterated and forget about everything, to dance while the world is burning – even to burn with it. It’s playful and upbeat, but with some pretty dark undercurrents. It’s those nights when you set your mind to getting absolutely f*#@ed up, and nothing can stop you.”

Jack wrote, played, programmed, engineered and mixed the entire thing, either at home or in one of a number of places he was staying at while on a theatre tour of Australia – what with acting being another string to his bow. He used UK-based Metropolis Studios to master, and what a dark, techno-ish, dystopian dream of a tune they have together provided. It’s definitely one that suits a rave, somewhere around the time when dawn is pending its unwelcome arrival. One to thump into your bones, and to lose yourself in the subtle rhythms of.

A wonderfully odd animated video accompanies it, crafted by artist Joshua Shepherd. Check it out on YouTube. As a little spoiler, it contains a kind of anti-hero, trying to navigate through weird times and placed populated by aliens and nightmarish beast-machine type thingies. Not what I’d describe as a standard video, but it certainly helps to walk you through the song if the genre isn’t one you’re initially comfortable with. It’s fun.

What I can say is that this is absolutely one for the clubs, and underground. It’s for the dark. It’s for head-splitting volume and devil-may-care surroundings with like-minded children of the moon. An understated melody, a vocal that is controlled, measured and yet smacks of a just-passed wild ride and the promise of more chaos at the drop of a hat. What Jack has described this song as it absolutely what I got from it.

Play it loud. Play it outrageously late. Do not be teetotal. This is great club sounds. Get yourself a Goblin Problem.