True to their word, Brooklyn duo, Shy Child, keep a frenetic pace throughout Noise Won’t Stop. The album is a showcase of so-called ‘new rave’, but with a bouncy, shrieky edge that will keep enthusiasts (and all the neighbours in the block) up late into the night. It should probably come with an advisory sticker for anyone who is allergic to the interminable synth of happy hardcore, which some of us thought was safely locked away in the 90s vault for now. Wrong.

These guys have probably kept purveyors of fine keytars and other synth relics in business long after they would otherwise have turned away the last big-haired punter back in 1989, just as computers were taking over the dance music scene. Unfortunately, the Shy Child guys use these otherwise pleasing instruments in a way that would probably make big muscly blokes down the local nightclub rhythmically punch the air and ‘build shelves’ in a not entirely pleasing way.

This album harks back to the dance paradigm where a low fidelity sound built to a crescendo of high definition wizardry, and that build up was the high point of an otherwise fairly predictable trajectory. It’s a formula that worked for many years before the punters tired of it, and its appearance on an album at this point in time seems either hopelessly out of date or the start of a brand new revival. Obviously the fans of this 21st century take on 90s techno will be yelling above the din that this is the new future of dance music.

Noise Won’t Stop is too testosterone-fuelled for this listener, and while it will please the fans – angry dance-oriented boys, mostly – it jabs too hard and with too little variation to do anything for me. Like it or loathe it, with bands like Shy Child and Lo Fi Fnk, the 90s dance revival has finally arrived.

Susanna Nelson