A new batch of songs by Yuasa-Exide is a fine way to start any day. Silver Spoon Hallucination pulls together material dating back to 2022 and as recent as last week, yet it plays with the urgency of someone caught in an internal tug-of-war between escaping reality and fighting it head-on. That tension is what makes this record crackle. Excitement, originality, and empowerment have always been central to Douglas Busson’s work, but his lo-fi approach feels especially sharp and satisfying here.

Don’t Rat is one of his most accessible recent songs and an easy rallying cry against whatever local Gestapo happens to be intruding on your life. “We can’t keep riding down the road to ruin / Does anybody know what they’re doing?” might as well be the thesis statement for the entire record. Busson doesn’t hand out answers, but he asks the right questions and sets them to a soundtrack that’s constantly pulled between unsettling and exhilarating. The mood is twitchy but infectious, equal parts sneering protest, late-night anxiety spiral, and stubborn, cracked optimism that keeps moving even when everything feels busted.

My Psychic hits with enough low-end force to physically wake your speakers. Time Regained Again offers a brief midpoint breather, though even that comes wrapped in angst. There’s the proto-punk snap of Your Zodiac, the beat-poetry pulse of Canal Street, and another jolt of electricity in Intellectual Destiny Whatever, before Busson strips things back to guitar, shrieks, and noise on Crush Proof. It closes with the line “Nothing can hurt us / We’re crush proof”—uplifting on paper, delivered bordering on sarcasm.

Times are bleak, sure. But the fact that Yuasa-Exide can casually drop a record this alive into the world is reason enough to stay hopeful.

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