Academy Order have never been particularly interested in staying inside one musical lane. The Nashville-based band's sound has been informed by goth, post-punk, and new wave, and their latest collaboration pushes further into the electronic influences that have been there from the beginning.
“Remember the Night (Spectral Body Alt Version)” finds Academy Order handing the track over to J. Weilburg of Spectral Body, an industrial project that Weilburg describes as “minimal EBM” or “electronic body punk.”
The track will appear on Academy Order’s forthcoming EP, The Order of Love, due in early 2027 through Seeing Red Records. The release will compile new songs with remixes and alternate versions of existing material.
For Academy Order’s Matthew Green, the move toward EBM isn’t much of a departure from the band’s punk foundation. “I don’t think you are too far off at all,” Greene tells me after I described my own association with EBM as Front 242 and people taking speed. “Simply synthesizer-heavy music with the punch of club and punk.”
Green says he and Norelle Green have been drawing from EBM and industrial music since they began writing together for Academy Order. “When Norelle and I started putting pen to paper, we sought to combine the electric aggression of Nitzer Ebb’s That Total Age and the punk-informed melancholia of TSOL’s Change Today?,” he explains. “There’s a palpable aggression to the early decades of tracks. It’s hard to ignore.”
That connection between punk and electronic music is also central to Spectral Body.
Weilburg began performing under the name in 2022, after ideas from other industrial projects he was involved with became more beat-driven and less experimental. Like the Greens, his musical background is rooted in punk, a world he still inhabits through his band Zero Sum. At the same time, electronic music had been an influence for years.
“I grew up being drawn to early Mute Records bands such as Fad Gadget, Depeche Mode, and The Normal,” Weilburg says. “As time went on, I found the foundational EBM bands like Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, DAF, etc. All those bands, plus projects like Coil and Suicide, heavily play into the sound I’ve tried to cultivate.”
Rather than viewing EBM and punk as separate worlds, Weilburg sees a direct line connecting the two. “I see EBM, specifically those early records, and by extension what I do, as an evolution of punk, just with synthesizers and sequencers in place of guitars,” he says. “The energy and urgency are there.”
That shared perspective makes Spectral Body a natural fit for reworking Academy Order. Both projects may arrive at the intersection from different directions, but neither has much interest in treating punk and electronic music as mutually exclusive.
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Seeing Red Records will release The Order of Love in early 2027.
Academy Order on social media: Bandcamp | Instagram
Spectral Body on social media: Bandcamp | Instagram
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