If you’ve been sleeping on Prague’s finest purveyors of gloom and groove, LAKESIDE X just kicked the damn door down to wake you up. Three years. That’s how long we’ve been waiting for new noise from these guys since Love Disappears. And what they’re serving up with “Factory Flowers” isn’t merely a return, but a declaration of war.
You’ve got Jakub Zachoval’s guitar slicing through the electronic fog, while Igor Dvorský lays down a beat that sounds like a factory press crushing skulls. Robert Broj’s keyboards aren’t there to soothe you—they’re building a dystopian wall of noise that feels claustrophobic in the best way possible. And then you have Janne Marvannen. That fragile, distinctive voice of his is still there, but now it’s got grit. He sounds like a man watching the world burn while holding the match.
And that’s exactly what this song is about. Janne lays it out plain: we’re the generation that saw the first PC, the first phone, the first internet. And now? We’re handing our souls over to algorithms. He’s not singing about the future; he’s raging against the now. “Where algorithms and technology prevail, humanity dies.” That’s the core of it. The song captures that feeling of being trapped in a virtual bubble while the real world crumbles.
With Adrian T. Bell handling the visuals, this whole package feels like a middle finger to the digital void. Daniel Myer—the mad scientist behind Haujobb and Covenant—is back in the producer’s chair, and he’s given this thing a gritty, muscular texture that sounds like it was forged in a steel mill.
If this is the first taste of the album dropping this fall, buckle up. LAKESIDE X just raised the bar, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it. Catch them at Cargo Gallery on June 12 if you want to feel this one rattle your bones live.