May 26

May 26 Album Review : Youth Code - Yours, With Malice (2025)

I never liked dancing. Not because I’m incapable of it (though I am), but because it feels like the most self-conscious activity on Earth. You step onto a floor and agree to a social contract that says: I will flail around in rhythm while others flail around in rhythm, and we’ll all pretend we’re free while secretly judging each other in silence.

This is how I ended up getting into electronic body music. EBM isn’t about joy or release. It’s about control and alienation, the sound of someone trying to make meaning out of emotional entropy. It’s dance music for people who never wanted to be perceived.

That’s what makes Yours, With Malice, the new EP from Youth Code, feel both wildly anachronistic and strangely essential. It’s seventeen minutes of industrial exorcism. EBM as interpreted by people who grew up on hardcore matinees and emotionally repressed home lives. It made me dance like a movie villain asserting male dominance. Which is to say: this shit moves, but it also hurts.

Youth Code isn’t a throwback act. They’re not trying to recreate Skinny Puppy or Nitzer Ebb in cosplay. They’ve always approached EBM like it’s a weapon you could smuggle into a punk show, and on Yours, With Malice, they refine that strategy down to its most personal, emotional, and hostile elements. This isn’t just music to soundtrack violence. It’s music that understands that emotional violence is the most relatable genre of all.

The opener No Consequence is the most traditional track here: a stabbing, neon-lit groove with a synth line sharp enough to shave your head. It’s EBM 101, but filtered through Sara Taylor’s fury, which feels less like a performance and more like a report filed from the inside of a collapsing relationship. She doesn’t sing so much as threaten. And yet it’s not theatrical. It’s what heartbreak sounds like when you're too angry to cry and too tired to scream.

Wishing Well follows with a slightly slower cadence, trading fury for disgust. It's not just the BPM that drops, it’s the emotional tone. This is the moment in a breakup where you stop hoping the other person will understand you and start hoping they never text you again. The two tracks are siblings, not twins, emotionally conjoined but spiritually diverging. One is a clenched fist. The other is a middle finger.

In Search of Tomorrow shifts gears completely. It introduces melodic synths that almost feel out of place—like someone turned on a Chemical Brothers record in the middle of a riot. And yet it works. The contrast between the relentless drum programming and the retro-futuristic hooks creates this feeling of forward motion in spite of yourself. The song sounds like it's running toward the future while shouting over its shoulder: "What the hell are we even doing?"

By the time we reach Make Sense, the EP detours into something bordering on vulnerability. The beat drops out. The distortion dials back. Sara Taylor starts leaning into her lines a little bit and displaying the grit in her voice. There are hints of dub, of house, even ambient textures if you squint hard enough. It’s not a banger in the traditional sense, but it’s undeniably gripping, like someone who’s been tough for too long finally letting themselves sound wounded.

It’s not my favorite song on the record, but it might be the one I think about the most. And that counts for something.

The closer I’m Sorry doesn’t tie things up so much as set them on fire. This is the emotional culmination of the EP’s unspoken narrative, a relationship that’s been breaking down in real time, ending not with a whimper but with an ice-cold declaration of indifference. This is a love song with notes not worth singing, Taylor claims. Not because the feelings are gone, but because the audience doesn’t deserve the encore. It’s the harshest song here, both sonically and emotionally. Which makes it the perfect ending.

Yours, With Malice is a short record, but it contains multitudes: breakups, disillusionment, rage, grief, and dancing so hard you might actually feel something again. It’s not just angry music. It’s disenchanted music. The sound of people who believed in something once, then watched that belief rust in real time. That’s what makes Youth Code more than a genre act, they’re not just making EBM in 2025. They’re making music for people who have outlived their optimism and still need a place to put their energy.

It made me dance. Not joyfully. Not even angrily. But convulsively, like something primal was being pulled out of me and rearranged to a beat. And honestly, if a record can do that in under twenty minutes, it’s already won.