New side project alert! For many years, Alex Edkins has been the leader of the kickass Toronto noise-rock power trio METZ. Last year, Edkins started a solo project called Weird Nightmare and released a really good self-titled debut album and a few very catchy singles. Now, Edkins has teamed up with Graham Walsh, one of the keyboardists for the long-running Toronto dance-rock band Holy Fuck, to start a new group called Noble Rot.

Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh have known each other for more than a decade; Walsh contributed to the first METZ album in 2011. In Noble Rot, Edkins and Walsh make tough, pulsing music together. The duo’s terse and synthy post-punk owes a definite stylistic debt to Wire, so it’s cool that Wire legend Colin Newman helped out on their forthcoming debut album Heavenly Bodies, Repetition, Control. (Malka Spigel, from Minimal Compact and Immersion, also contributed.)

Noble Rot’s debut single “Casting No Light” is a propulsive, percussive track that starts out minimal and grows into something explosive. It sounds really cool! You can hear bits and pieces of both METZ and Holy Fuck, but it sounds more like its own thing than like either of those two bands. Below, check out director John Smith‘s experimental video for “Casting No Light” and the tracklist for Noble Rot’s debut album.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Suspension”
02 “Casting No Light”
03 “Empire Of Iceboxes”
04 “Medicine”
05 “Come Up For Air”
06 “Pictures From The Institution”
07 “The Desert”
08 “Light At The Edge Of The World”

Heavenly Bodies, Repetition, Control is out 3/24 on Joyful Noise’s White Label Series.