Maximalism of Possibility: Giant Claw’s Decadent Stress Chamber

Orange Milk founder Keith Rankin spins chopped up bits of t.A.T.u. and Selena Gomez into a thrilling invocation of a gaudy, unliveable present, finds Claire Biddles

From Sunik Kim’s dense noise monoliths to aya’s 4am horror stories, much of the best contemporary electronic music embodies the inherent chaos of life in 2025. This music is often intimidating, jarring, or straightforwardly unpleasant, born from circumstances that Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux snappily termed “a gaudy, unlivable present” – or, in other words, a Decadent Stress Chamber.

But despite this ominous title, Keith Rankin’s fifth album as Giant Claw represents a heel turn from the nihilistic excess of the zeitgeist. Decadent Stress Chamber is maximalism of possibility: a commingling of worldly frenzy and human warmth that feels positively utopian. Across eight tracks, Rankin re-shapes elements of seemingly hundreds of genres – K-pop, yacht rock, industrial goth, prog – into big, earnest pop songs. The result is alchemic, like the noise from a fast-moving dial on a radio somehow producing a rock opera.

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