Madmax We're Bringing Dubstep Back!

On their debut album “We’re bringing dubstep back!”, Madmax - forward-leaning to the point of gleeful imbalance - invite the listener into a musical universe that is as unruly as it is precise. Across ten tracks, the band moves restlessly through a kaleidoscope of sounds and states of mind: rattling surf-rock skids into Shibuya-crossing math-rock glare; a floating, tongue-in-cheek art-pop lament about the theft of a musician’s livelihood channels its sorrow through snarling fuzz guitar and a long, yearning tuba line; a contrapuntal, Copacabana-tinged serenade, all wavering glockenspiel, is abruptly upended by surges of synth and guitar. Elsewhere, punk riffs snap and fracture into childlike fragments and Duracell-charged hyperpop; western guitar lays a steady hand beneath drifting, Tristano-esque piano lines; sugar-rush disco spins out under the strange insistence of a synth-programmed cuíca; meditative textures open, unexpectedly, into something tender and pop-adjacent; and, at the last, sampling collides with the manic logic of a pinball machine.
Madmax came together in Trondheim in the winter of 2022, when synthesist Anna Ueland and tubist Hermann Hestbek set out, ostensibly, to form a band for live dance music. Guitarist Albert Rygh and drummer Niklas Heide were brought in, and what emerged - almost immediately - was something less obedient: an instinctive pull toward odd metres, layered rhythmic systems, the friction and fusion of electronic and acoustic sound, and a harmonic language that refuses to sit still. Their first show took place at the now-defunct Lokal Scene in Trondheim, followed by a small but telling run of concerts across Norway.
When the time came to record, the band decamped to the artist collective La Maison Matrice in the village of Crémines, Switzerland, where the material was shaped and sharpened in the summer of 2024 - just as all four had graduated from the Trondheim jazz programme. The album itself was recorded over four concentrated days at Studio Paradiso in Oslo in February 2025, with Martin Miguel Almagro Tonne (Pom Poko) as producer, engineer and mixer. His open, unprejudiced approach to sound proved an ideal counterpart to the band’s own.
The title is delivered with a dry, sideways smile: a nod to the maximalist dubstep of the 2010s, and a playful suggestion that such a form might be hauled - knowingly, impossibly - back into the light. For a band born around the millennium, dubstep carries the weight of early-listening nostalgia. Yet anyone arriving in search of genre fidelity will likely leave empty-handed. The more interesting question is not whether this is dubstep - it is not - but what, precisely, it might be. What it does share with that lineage, however, is a taste for risk: a music that turns corners sharply, that refuses prediction, that courts excess without apology.
Like many of their peers orbiting the Trondheim jazz environment, Madmax are less interested in preserving improvisation than in re-situating it - testing its limits, stretching its definitions, and letting it refract through new contexts. The quartet operates in colour, in contrast, in motion. At their most fully realised, they live up to their name: unrestrained, maximal, and very much alive to the possibilities of going just a little too far.