Reinvigorating the Past

On the Polish artist’s new album Mgła (Fog), the nostalgic impulse that shapes most Cold Wave music gives way to a disconcerting immediacy.

So many records are revisiting the post-punk vibe of the early 1980s that quality control is a problem. Frequently, they miss the forest for the trees, getting the details right – half-sung snarls, synths that predate the Yamaha DX-7, drums packed too tightly to resonate – but missing out on the menace that made that era so compelling.

Bzdet doesn’t make that mistake.

Since the pandemic, he has been remarkably prolific, releasing singles and even albums at a breakneck pace, as though he felt compelled to rage against complacency.

While Mgła doesn’t break new ground, the album consolidates his many strengths.

Writing in the 1950s about the “New Music” he loved, roughly four decades after it came on the classical music scene, Theodor Adorno lamented the way its refusal of beauty had been subsumed within a more expansive concept of the beautiful.

In other words, once Arnold Schönbeg and Igor Stravinsky were no longer shocking the public, the significance of their innovations was lost.

Although Adorno disliked any music that prioritised a simple beat and would surely have found post-punk as objectionable as the rock-and-roll he encountered in the 1950s and 1960s, his way of thinking about New Music can be productively applied to the alternative culture of the early 1980s.

We keep going back to that era because most of the music that has come since is less innovative. But the more we return to that well, the closer it gets to drying up entirely.

This is where Bzdet comes in.

Bzdet understands that that period of history was particularly fraught in Poland, with the Solidarity movement’s rapid spread leading to the imposition of martial law, just as more popular culture from the West was making its way into the Eastern Bloc.

Far more than in countries like the UK, US, or Germany, post-punk in Poland was the soundtrack for intellectual and political ferment.

Perhaps because Bzdet is too young to have experienced that era, he doesn’t feel compelled to rehearse its hits.

On the contrary, he consistently opts for less mainstream approaches, mining the independent label scene for inspiration.

There’s just enough No Wave funk on Mgła to break the spell of Doomer monotony.

“Koszmar” (Nightmare) is a perfect example. Short and to the point, like every song on the record, it hurtles forward like a dance track gone wrong as the Polish lyrics consign its disaffected male subject to the grave.

“Ogród” (Garden) sounds like it was recorded underwater, as a beat pings weakly off a landscape of ruins:

In my garden

There’s nothing left

Not even a single leaf left

In my garden

There’s nothing left

In my garden

I’ve run out of strength

While Bzdet’s lyrics are not explicitly political, they forcefully communicate the despair of someone watching people turn away from trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

Like many countries throughout the developed world, Poland struggles with the cynical posturing of authoritarian populism. This makes it difficult to speak truth to power in the traditional activist sense. Instead, a more abstract approach is required.

In performances and videos, Bzdet always wears a mask.

This gesture aligns his work with figures like Banksy and Burial, who famously warded off the compulsion to identify.

But it also feels unhinged in a way that the anonymity of those British artists did not. Bzdet don’t just want to disappear into the music. He wants to convey the danger of concealment.