R.I.P. to the internet. In the same way those who believed in punk’s revolutionary promise had declared it dead by 1977 (despite the music’s persistence), tech critics have long argued that we’re spending our lives on a necrotic World Wide Web that decays further every day. The Dead Internet Theory argues that the combined effects of SEO juicing, corporatized traffic flow, and the overwhelming presence of bots have riddled the system with so many cavities it’s functionally incapable of sustaining pure human expression. Presumably, you already know this—you’re reading this on the internet, after all. But knowledge is one thing, and the experience of that knowledge is another. Should you need help translating the mental phenomenon of dead internet citizenship into something you can feel in your physical body, Credit Card’s Devil’s Night / Dead Internet is one weird trick to help you feel worse about the computer in only 23 minutes. Technocapitalists hate them for this!
The Detroit duo of Shaun Hunter and Max Dameron say Devil’s Night / Dead Internet isn’t an EP or an LP but a mixtape. It’s a cute touch to label a release this critical of the internet with a form heavily associated with the internet. But it’s also an apt description of what this record does, placing fermenting noise, disconcertingly beautiful pieces of musique concrète, pleasingly ugly sound collage, and generic static between EBM and synth-punk songs played so viciously and fractured so dramatically they seem like they’re being screened on a punched-out computer monitor. Songs are snipped unnaturally short, like they’ve been taped off the radio. The feeling of motion dominates the record without the relieving sense that you’re actually going somewhere. There are so many melody-swerving techniques, so many detours from traditional songcraft, on Devil’s Night / Dead Internet that its shorter and more abstract moments never feel like they’re merely a way of fattening the runtime; the unruly outbursts are just as important—and, more importantly, just as good—as the more structured songs.
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“This Is a Debt You Can Never Repay,” the tape’s first proper song as well as its best, speeds through a hailstorm of noise on a motorik beat. That beat—made by a single frothy tone halfway between bass and percussion—pulls the song forward with relentless intensity, a line drawn with expert precision and decorated with a curlicue of melody. It’s like being frogmarched by an algorithm, its hard rationality unyielding in the face of a song that seems to want to try something different. Just when it starts to feel like its doomscroll will never let you go, the song yields to a collage built around a nostalgic-sounding back-masked jewel tone. Secretions of noise try to cut through it, then silence themselves as if they’ve realized the beauty needs to be witnessed for a moment. Then they finish the job. The name of this latter track? “RHCP Tattoo.”
Across the 23 minutes, Hunter and Dameron show off their remarkable skills as sound designers. In another collage, “Pure Mood,” snippets of hyperpop are twisted and braided with digital squelches and distant thumps. The spangles of the melody shine through even as the bandwidth tightens its grip, and the sounds meld together into one thick cord; it’s like being strangled by a Tiffany necklace. In “Harsh Times,” competing layers of feedback sound like an owl’s hoot buried in the song’s body. The song itself is Skinny Puppy pastiche, but it knows it; it is exactly as retro as the dialup modem sample in its opening suggests. While the music is played with seemingly reckless abandon, every grain of noise on Devil’s Night / Dead Internet feels carefully considered.