Human Impact sound most convincing when the machinery threatens to come apart. On Gone Dark, guitar, bass, drums and electronics do not settle into a polite hierarchy; they scrape against one another, leaving Chris Spencer’s voice to fight for space inside the wreckage.
That friction has history behind it. Spencer built his reputation fronting Unsane, while Jim Coleman supplied electronics to Cop Shoot Cop, two bands embedded in the abrasive end of New York underground rock. Human Impact brought them together with bassist Chris Pravdica and drummer Phil Puleo for a self-titled debut released in March 2020, just as the pandemic erased the touring cycle that might have established the group onstage.
By the time Gone Dark arrived through Ipecac Recordings on 4 October 2024, the rhythm section had changed. Eric Cooper of Made Out of Babies and Bad Powers took over bass, with Daughters drummer Jon Syverson behind the kit. The connection was practical before it became official: during the 2020 lockdown, Spencer travelled into Austin for informal sessions with Cooper and Syverson while working on a cabin in East Texas. Those sessions eventually fed into touring line-ups and then Human Impact itself.
The difference is audible. Cooper and Syverson give Spencer’s brittle guitar a hard, mobile chassis rather than simply adding weight. Opener Collapse stretches past five minutes without losing pressure; Disconnect, by contrast, compresses the band into just over three. Across nine tracks, Coleman’s electronics function less as decoration than atmosphere and structural damage: signals flare, textures smear and empty spaces acquire their own menace.
Gone Dark was recorded at Cedar Creek Studio in Austin with Andrew Schneider co-producing alongside the band. Its construction reflects a desire to get closer to Human Impact’s live force, with interstitial material helping songs bleed into one another rather than behaving like isolated units.
That matters because this is not a nostalgia project assembled from recognisable underground résumés. The lineage is obvious — Spencer’s serrated guitar language is unmistakable, and Coleman still understands how electronics can make rock music feel physically unstable — but Gone Dark works through combination rather than citation. Destroy to Rebuild, Reform and Corrupted turn repetition into pressure, allowing the rhythm section to push while the upper frequencies splinter.
Human Impact began with formidable histories already attached to every member. On their second album, those histories finally feel secondary. The interesting thing is the machine they have built together.
