Manufacturing jobs may not be coming back, but industrial is in. Since its commercial high point in the mid-1990s, when you could say “I wanna fuck you like an animal” to the percussive hiss of a steam valve opening and headline the Woodstock sequel, the often-brutal, occasionally ridiculous form of machine music has mostly stayed underground. Blame it on ’90s nostalgia, or on the world’s drift toward the kind of ruinous techno-wasteland that birthed industrial in the first place, but it’s suddenly everywhere. Folk singers are wearing demon horns. Superstars are fawning over Trent Reznor, who is himself preparing for Nine Inch Nails’ first world tour in several years. The record that most fully captures the rank spirit of 2025—aya’s hexed!—is a blown-out collage of panic and distorted beats forged by an artist from Manchester, a city whose fortunes rose and crashed with the Industrial Revolution so dramatically it helped to birth communism. On Yours, With Malice, Youth Code return after half a decade to a cultural moment primed for their throat-bleeding industrial and EBM with an EP that hammers away so relentlessly, it pounds the line between machine and human into dust.

While their music has always borrowed as heavily from hardcore and metal as from the likes of Front 242 and :wumpscut:, Youth Code’s records have never been as intense and messy as they feel like they should. While that tension between snarling attitude and relatively accessible music made for compelling listening, it suddenly feels pale in the light of Yours, With Malice. The five-song EP is the first new music Sara Taylor and Ryan George have released since 2021’s King Yosef collaboration A Skeleton Key in the Doors of Depression and their first true Youth Code record in nearly a decade. It feels like Youth Code mk2, a hard reset of their sound in which the specter of violence that’s always haunted their music comes fully alive, drenched in sweat and showered in sparks.

Taylor’s vocals have always been the key to Youth Code’s music, and on Yours, With Malice, they charge forward, in lock-step with the frying synths and programmed d-beat drums. While EBM and industrial singers can sometimes come off as the magician at the controls of the throbbing machine, her agender bark seems to come from within the machine itself, as if her veins are fused into oil lines. She commands these songs as if she’s a hardcore singer, and the music believes her. “I’ll never pretend to be something I’m not,” she spits in the chorus of opener “No Consequence,” and you can see her lashing at the crowd on each syllable. Textures clash all around her—fist-pumping drums, overheating synths, a sinister keyboard line, everything on the edge of misfiring. It’s like someone poured vinegar into New Order’s circuitry. She screams the bitter triumph of “In Search of Tomorrow”’s chorus like she’s flinging her convictions into an angry sky.

“No Consequence” and “Wishing Well,” which follows it, are thrillingly boxed productions, like they’re being played in a small room whose walls are creeping in. “In Search of Tomorrow,” though, blasts these small spaces apart without losing any of the built-up intensity. Taylor’s melody is buzzy and breathless, and she’s pulled forward by a leashed rhythm track that strains toward breakbeat. The synth pattern at the song’s core, though, is a gauzy and conventionally beautiful chord progression that, ripped out of this ferocious context, could’ve powered a minor hit in the New Romantic ’80s. While not as demanding as the EP’s heavier songs, these moments are where this new version of Youth Code feels most accomplished. The airiness of that chord progression, combined with how powerfully Taylor pushes the limits of the chorus, gives the song a bittersweet tang that is, in the proper sense of the word, sublime: hostile, powerful, and awe-inspiring.

In times of urgency, menace, and social claustrophobia, it makes sense to cling to music that is vicious and confident in the righteousness of its anger. Yours, With Malice is exactly that kind of music, obviously. Nearly every second of this EP’s 17 minutes is reactive, in that it feels like the result of provocation. You can feel an implied history tangled in the wake of the songs, scraps of ruined beauty and thwarted will clattering in the rear distance. Even the conceptual framing of EBM—dance music, but mean—implies a fallen state, a ruined party, a spiteful good time. In its frenzy and indignation, Yours, With Malice is powered by the adrenalized panic that comes in the moment between realizing you’ve been wounded and feeling the pain—a state of opportunity.