Normal Bias, one of the most exciting new acts on the American underground, returns with a new song called “Soft Power,” their first new music since 2024’s Kingdom Come album. It officially arrives on Friday, but you can watch a world premiere of the music video here.
“Soft Power” is a dense, powerful track that retains their trademark funk while pushing them further into EBM territory. Built on a massive, thumping beat, a sturdy, screwball synth line crashes into the mix with the dark-club energy of modern acts like Buzz Kull and Pixel Grip. Additional layers of sound keep things moving, including high-pitched electronic patter that arrives late in the song. Matt Weiner delivers restrained, sultry vocals in his familiar Gahan-esque style.
The accompanying music video, directed by Logan Devlin, is just as chaotic and colorful. It brings surrealist paintings to life through a combination of live performance and stop-motion, all flecked with vintage VHS glitch. It’s full of disembodied eyeballs, mysterious doorways, desert landscapes, and melting clocks that oozed out of a Salvador Dali painting.
Here’s what Normal Bias says about the new song:
“‘Soft Power’ confronts the numbing effects of propagandized multimedia addiction that looms over the modern world and enables the worst instincts of our leaders and institutions and leads us further into nowhere and nothing.”
NORMAL BIAS announces new album, Ways of Keeping Clean
“Soft Power” is the first taste of a forthcoming album from Normal Bias, called Ways of Keeping Clean, that arrives in 2027.
Ways of Keeping Clean is the follow-up to their 2024 debut album, Kingdom Come, which I included in my list of the year’s best albums. Kingdom Come contains eight tracks of what they called “industrial body funk,” an ecstatic blend of funky, powerful beats and sharp synth arrangements. Crucial moments include “Holy,” a sleek track that channels Violator-era Depeche Mode, “Falling Down,” a shimmering synth-driven groove, and “Embody Control,” a sinister club banger with warped vocal samples that hover across its dark, funky beat.
Normal Bias caught my attention in 2022 with their self-titled EP and quickly became a favorite for the way they stripped apart retro sounds and rebuilt them with a sharper, harder edge—a “pump and dump scheme,” they call it. The duo consists of Atlanta-based musician Matt Weiner of That Which Is Not Said (aka TWINS) and New York’s Chris Campion of Multiple Man.
They’re no strangers to making excellent music videos. Their 2024 video for “Falling Down” features a seamlessly edited horizontal scroll set against a stark white backdrop, which creates the illusion of a single take. In 2025, they dropped a video for “Holy” that was filmed at the decrepit Holy Land USA theme park in Connecticut and featured the band posing among oversize, tacky crosses. Both made my annual best music videos countdowns.
Big thanks to Normal Bias and everyone on their team for trusting me to premiere the “Soft Power” video.
