"Forget the calculators and the cold precision usually found in the genre because IKAD! have arrived from Serbia with a debut that turns complex polyrhythms into a high-speed playground."
Belgrade is becoming a weirdly fertile ground for music that defies categorization and IKAD! feels like a lightning strike in a bottle on their debut track Jesus Was Born. The name suggests a shout into the void and the music follows through with a frantic kind of joy that feels like someone finally solved a Rubik’s cube at a hundred miles per hour. It starts with a cleanliness that feels almost clinical but it explodes into something far more human and messy.
There is a lineage of technical wizardry that runs through the complex tapping of Covet and reaches into the heavier polyrhythmic weight of Animals As Leaders but this Serbian outfit manages to find a sweetness that often gets lost in the academic woods of the genre. Most math rock acts get trapped in the arithmetic and forget the rock and yet IKAD! treats every odd time signature like a playground rather than a classroom. You can hear the influence of Chon in the breezy guitar tones but there is a distinct European grit under the fingernails here.
