GNOD + MC Sissi - Inner Fucking Peace

Less than six months after Gnod rewired their sound for the umpteenth time, with the release of deliciously detailed deep listener Spot Land, they’re back with another album and a whole new approach. Inner Fucking Peace comprises eight tracks for voice and electronics – varied in style but connected in feeling, and recorded as a trio. Chris Haslam and Paddy Shine, the two ever-present members in the Gnod lineup since their first stirrings in mid-2000s Salford, are completed by Portuguese vocalist MC Sissi.

Inner Fucking Peace is the first time Sissi, or Cecilia de Fatima dos Santos, has recorded with Gnod. Already a known name in Portuguese experimental circles, she and Paddy met in early 2022 on an artists’ residency near the northern Portugal/Spain border. It was an inspirational experience deep in the mountains, a cavalcade of surrealist occurrences and psychomagic activity worthy of cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (a fave of Paddy and Sissi both, as it happens). At the end of it, the pair got married in Porto, and now live together in Ireland, where they recorded their parts of this album – exchanging ideas digitally with Chris, who recorded the eerie synth frameworks in his Hebden Bridge studio.

With Paddy building drum patterns on Chris’ tracks, Sissi’s contribution wasn’t even in the script. As these instrumentals were being tweaked one Irish evening, she picked up a mic and started to freestyle some vocals over the top: dramatic narration, mournful crooning, heck a little autotune... one take for the whole lot and a whole new dimension to the album. The lyrics are all in Portuguese, but don’t worry if you don’t know what Sissi’s singing about – neither does she. It’s fully stream-of-consciousness, reacting to the music in real time.

So from the minimalist tuned percussion of ‘Stop’, to the shuffling beats and spaced-out synth on ‘Perde-Te Onde Quiseres’, to ‘Get Out’ and its ominous electronics and crashing industrial drums (combined with Sissi’s irate-sounding vocal, here Gnod are on a tip that compares to great Bristolian duo and recent touring partners Harrga), to the supremely chopped and screwed woodwind that’s central to ‘Flute Theme’, to ‘Reprise’s hypnotic handdrum workout, to ‘Tea and Eggs’ – ten minutes of reggaeton-gone-minimal-synth – to ‘Olivia’, named after Sissi’s niece and the track’s guest vocalist (she’s eleven years old now, but a baby on this recording), to ‘Cannela Crematoria’ closing us out and hitting a zenith of gloominess with some more industrial battery folded in… this is a full on Gnod vibe shift that also makes total sense in their infamously extensive discography.

With this band enjoying hard-won freedom from release schedule tyranny, they – just like us – don’t know what’s next on the recording agenda, or if there’ll be more Gnod and MC Sissi collab albums, but this is an engrossing introduction to the partnership. In the short term, the trio will be playing some European shows in the autumn, including a slot at Utrecht festival Le Guess Who? in November.