You’d never hear high-browed admit it, but the cultural relevance and influence of the world pre-‘60s is kind of lost on 21st century innovation. Bands mine brittle, shit-kicking garage rock, or primal synthwave, or malformed krautrock or legendary film soundtracks – but the movements of the 1950s have all but disappeared in modern context. The reasons are obvious, pop music and the concept of an album was a phenomenon that grew with the Beatles repertoire and icons like Chuck Berry or Little Richard never had the chance to commit transcendental records in their prime, the music industry just didn’t work that way. It’s that background which makes Alex Hungtai’s Dirty Beaches project so immediately interesting. His process is clear; reinterpreting dusty, croon-rock swing into a haunted below-fi landscape in a hugely impressive instance of borrowed nostalgia – he approaches his songwriting with such mainlined dedication it’s hard to find any potential alternate comparison. Badlands is 28 minutes and 8 songs long, for such a small dose it has a profoundly distinct effect – but more importantly, for the duration of those 28 minutes, nobody sounds quite like him.

In a sense, Hungtai’s process is simple – the first ten seconds of opener ‘Speedway King’ sums up his entire operation. There’s a melody there, somewhere, representing rock & roll’s jaunty prehistory with an obsessed exactness, but the music is so battered, so cloaked in a deteriorating analog miasma, that the resulting sound is one of the most instantly eyebrow-raising impacts of the year. His tunneling, baritone wail deep out of reach, his guitar a chunky atonal smudge, and his drums a weightless pitter-patter – these are fairly common ingredients to most familiar with a lo-fi ethos, but when adapted so thoroughly to a school of music thought to be permanently lulled to a place of harmless kitsch, it conjures something indisputably striking.

Hungtai works his moniker through a few variations on the same theme; on ‘True Blue’ he calms his tape-shredding rampage to a thoughtful ballad, still sonically tarnished, but gentle in its approach. His best song, ‘Sweet 17′ sounds like an eerie, half-formed nightmare of what the more dramatic one-act pop songs of the ‘50s could have been – engaging in a nocturnal, and explosively schizophrenic pounding on the senses, kinda like Suicide’s similar bloodthirsty tribute, ‘Frankie Teardrop.’ The last two tracks ‘Black Nylon’ and ‘Hotel’ are mere amniotic, vocal-less passages which, although arguably more moody than everything else on the album, can’t help but seem a little empty. It’s easy to make the core complaint that there are simply not enough songs here, outside of the ambience only six are left, but for all the lack of physical content, the abstract, shadowy mood Badlands can put on a room is second to none. It may be a record of limited resource, but it is also a record of intrinsic focus.

The biggest detraction that can be made towards Dirty Beaches is simply that his aesthetic exceeds the project’s other attributes by light years. This is pretty difficult to dispute; it’s hard to even get a sense of what Hungtai truly wants to do with his songwriting with how deeply he buries himself, and when he does puncture through he sounds a lot like his influences, I’m sure that’s by design but it doesn’t necessarily erase concern. He obviously understands the alchemy behind his production is a winner, and is pretty willing to rest his young career on that – the ramifications of such specificness will probably reveal themselves in the years head. What I can say for sure though, is that the textural impact of Badlands needs very little introduction or explanation. When it arrives, all ears prick up – it’s impossible to ignore or file away.