Perth-based experimental psych outfit Monotonic return with their second single, ‘Lazers At Dawn,’ out January 30 via Hidden Shoal, and the latest preview of their forthcoming album ‘Heavy Metal’ (due March 27).

Where previous single ‘The Purple Chords Play Belle Fourche’ introduced the band’s woozy, wide-angle approach to psychedelia, ‘Lazers At Dawn’ pushes deeper into murk, momentum, and menace.

A haze of fuzz, delay, and buzzing harmonics coils around thumping, almost motorik drums, driving the track forward with hypnotic insistence. Vocals drift in and out of focus, smeared into the mix as texture rather than declaration, lending an unexpectedly melodic pull to a song that otherwise thrives on abrasion and density. It’s psych-rock viewed through a funhouse mirror: propulsive, disorienting, and strangely intimate.

The track was conceived after a late-night viewing of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s cult 1968 film Performance, soundtracked by spins of Spiritualized’s ‘Lazer Guided Melodies’ and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Between the Buttons’. That collision of decadent London psychedelia and modern shoegaze grit informs both the song’s atmosphere and its refusal to settle into any single lineage. Instead, Monotonic operate in a blurred zone where vintage counterculture imagery meets contemporary experimental production.

The accompanying video, directed by Cam Merton, expands on these themes through a collage of archival and AI-animated imagery depicting British subcultures of the late ’60s and early ’70s, from Suedeheads and Rockers to occult fringe groups, before descending into gleeful, absurd destruction. As frontman Liam explains, the intent was less nostalgic reverence than pointed satire: a warped reflection on cultural memory, digital manipulation, and the increasingly flimsy line between homage and fabrication.

With ‘Heavy Metal,’ Monotonic appear less interested in reviving psychedelic tradition than in interrogating it — dragging its ghosts into the present, distorting their shapes, and letting the feedback hum where certainty once lived. “Lazers At Dawn” is both a continuation and a deepening of that mission: trance-inducing, unruly, and unapologetically strange.

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