Empires In Orbit - Audiodrome
There’s a certain kind of ambition that should, by all conventional wisdom, collapse under its own weight. Audiodrome, the latest album from industrial rock duo Empires In Orbit, is built around precisely that kind of ambition—and somehow makes the chaos feel entirely intentional.
Set to be released on August 14, 2026, via Doom City Records, Audiodrome is the first album from Empires In Orbit to feature German vocalist Fe Malefiz as a permanent member alongside multi-instrumentalist Gary Mann. Malefiz describes the record as “beautiful, confusing chaos,” while Mann’s shorthand—a “Lana del Reznor” mash-up—may be even more revealing of its ambition. There’s something theatrical, seductive, menacing, and wonderfully unhinged happening across its eleven tracks, with the duo treating genre boundaries less as rules than as suggestions.
The opening pairing of “The New Flesh” and “Cat Eyes” immediately establishes the album’s anything-goes philosophy. “Cat Eyes” is particularly effective, transforming what Mann initially considered an overly simple horror-trap experiment into one of the record’s biggest bangers. Its dark electronic pulse and deliberately cartoonish menace provide Malefiz with the perfect playground. Her vision of a Harley Quinn-like character—psychotic, sexy, cute and dangerous—comes through in a performance that feels less like conventional singing than inhabiting a character.
That theatricality is crucial to Audiodrome. These eleven songs don't simply move between styles; they seem to inhabit different worlds. Industrial electronics give way to indie-pop textures, hip-hop rhythms collide with metallic heaviness, and ambient passages create unsettling stretches of space. Yet the album never feels like a genre exercise for its own sake. Empires In Orbit understand that contrast is most effective when it serves emotion.
The following track, “A Siren’s Call,” pulls the record further into its cinematic darkness, while “Deja Vu” strips away much of the bombast for something considerably more vulnerable. Malefiz calls it the album’s most emotional and sorrowful song, and it’s difficult to argue just that. It's minimalistic and melancholic; the track captures heartbreak as something physical and disorienting, with its repetitive atmosphere creating the sensation of sinking further beneath the surface.
Mann’s decision to build “Deja Vu” around a sparse, vocal-driven arrangement proves particularly smart. In a record filled with sonic excess, restraint becomes its own form of power. There is nowhere for Malefiz’s voice to hide, and her performance turns the song into an emotional abyss.
The album's middle stretch continues to embrace contradiction. “Smoke Screen,” featuring Billy Price, adds another voice to the proceedings, while “Monarch” and “Before I Wake” reinforce the record’s shadowy industrial backbone. Then comes the previously released single, “Mother!”, arguably the album’s most visceral statement. Heavy guitars meet a vocal performance that sounds simultaneously wounded and threatening, perfectly matching Malefiz’s description of a world consumed by fear, inner demons and an overwhelming darkness.
The song’s weight is not merely musical. “Mother!” feels like the point where Audiodrome’s various personalities finally converge: horror, industrial rock, gothic drama and emotional vulnerability all occupying the same space. It’s a suitably huge centrepiece for an album that refuses to behave predictably.
Up next is the track “Porcelain,” which offers another shift in texture before the full-blown metal number “What’s Yet to Come,” featuring Allie French, and the closing “The Hardest Part” brings the record toward its conclusion. Rather than ending with a grand resolution, Empires In Orbit leave the listener with the lingering feeling that the journey has opened more doors than it has closed. That may be the album’s greatest strength. Audiodrome doesn't attempt to make its disparate influences neatly coexist. It lets them collide.
Empires In Orbit have been experimenting with electronic music since Gary Mann launched the project in 2015, accumulating six previous albums, millions of plays and collaborations that have stretched into film and ballet. With Malefiz now established as a permanent creative force, however, Audiodrome feels like more than another chapter. It sounds like a reset.
The result is an album that can be abrasive one moment, strangely beautiful the next, and occasionally both at once. It is gothic without being confined to gothic music, industrial without surrendering melody, cinematic without losing its visceral edge. Most importantly, it sounds like two musicians enjoying the freedom to make something that shouldn't work. And somehow, it does.
Audiodrome is messy, theatrical, unsettling and occasionally gloriously ridiculous—but beneath all that beautiful confusion is an album with a remarkably clear identity. Empires In Orbit aren't interested in choosing a lane. They're interested in blowing the lanes apart. So for a record that proudly promises “music without rules,” that's exactly the point.
Check out more from Empires In Orbit:
Check out more from Fe Malefiz:
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