RIYL: Handsome Furs, New Order, The Rapture

On their third release, Montreal trio We Are Wolves polish and refine their unique brand of indie, post-punk and electro to such a shine it’s hard to find another band to compare them to. They’re most reminiscent of It’s Blitz!-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs but they are still strikingly different in the way they combine punk and electronic music. While the YYYs practically abandoned their punk influences to create their dance-happy indie rock, We Are Wolves still embrace it, combining scuzzy garage rock riffs with Moroder-influenced synths in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Invisible Violence is a pendulum of a record, swinging back and forth between rock songs with an electronic edge like the opening track “Paloma” or electronic numbers with a slight rock edge, such as the epic “Reaching for the Sky.” It’s cold and detached while being energetic and in-your-face, like someone gave Gary Numan and fuzzbox and had him go to town. The term “dance-punk” doesn’t fit these guys, they could probably best be described as garage-electro; everything about them is lo-fi, with their wonderfully retro-sounding synths melding perfectly with their scuzzy guitars and howling vocals. This has to be the most hard-rocking, punk-friendly album ever to be obviously influenced by late-’70s disco. (Dare To Care Records 2010)

We Are Wolves MySpace Page