The Pop Group - Alien Blood (LP)

Alien Blood isn’t a lost studio album so much as a key to the lab where The Pop Group first cooked up Y. Issued by Mute on 1 November 2019 as part of the 40th anniversary campaign, it pulls together early versions, alternate mixes, and tape experiments from the 1979 sessions with producer Dennis Bovell. If you already know Y as a post‑punk landmark, this companion release lets you hear the mess, the heat, and the strange science that fed it.

Context helps. The Bristol crew of Mark Stewart, Gareth Sager, John Waddington, Simon Underwood, and Bruce Smith had a sound that didn’t respect boundaries. Funk rhythm sections slammed into free jazz skronk, while dub silence and echo carved out a different kind of space. Bovell, a dub pioneer, gave them room to be unruly but also helped shape the chaos into drama. Alien Blood makes that collaboration feel tactile. You can hear the edges of the room, the hiss of tape, the moments when a take is all spine and no skin yet still jolts you upright.

What’s striking is how physical this material feels. The drums thud and chatter in a way that suggests mic spill and live room air, not clinical edits. Bass lines are heavy but nimble, the kind you feel in your ribs before your ears catch up. Guitars turn into sheets of metal, then into clipped funk stabs, then into pure feedback. Stewart prowls rather than declaims. He sounds less like a frontman and more like someone testing how words can bend, smear, or splinter under pressure. The bones of familiar Y themes surface, but Alien Blood often leaves the connective tissue exposed, which is exactly the thrill.

Because these are prototype mixes and alternate takes from the Y sessions, you get a sense of the band’s method. They push a groove until it frays, then lean into the fray. They set up contrasts that shouldn’t work, then lock them into a lopsided dance. Bovell’s touch shows up in the way space is used. Instruments pop out and drop back, delays bloom and vanish, the floor falls away for a bar and then slams back. It’s not a gloss. It’s architecture. You can imagine faders being ridden by hand, decisions made in the heat of the moment rather than plotted on a grid.

If you came to The Pop Group through later reunion records, Alien Blood can feel like a dispatch from a different climate. It’s raw but not ragged for the sake of it. The band is already in full command of tension, already willing to leave mistakes in if the energy is right. That was always the secret of Y’s power, and this set underlines it. It also fits neatly with Y Live, the other archive piece from the anniversary run, which captures the band taking the studio experiments into a room full of bodies. One shows the blueprint. The other shows the building on fire.

As a listen on its own, Alien Blood holds together better than most outtakes collections. It isn’t sequenced like a mere appendix. The flow has an arc, from skeletal sketches to thicker, stranger forms. And on vinyl, the low end and the reverb haze open up in a way that suits the material. Alien Blood vinyl is worth hunting down if you prize texture and space. The Pop Group vinyl from this campaign was handled with care, and it shows when the needle hits. If you browse a Melbourne record store or sift through vinyl records Australia wide, spotting that sleeve feels like a small victory. Same goes if you prefer to buy The Pop Group records online. These are the kind of archive sets that go out of print and get talked about in hushed tones later.

Critical response to the reissue project backed that up. Publications that have long championed Y welcomed the depth of the archival work and the way it reframed a classic without sanding off its teeth. Fans have gravitated to Alien Blood because it doesn’t turn history into a museum piece. It moves, it sweats, it sometimes falls apart in your hands. That’s the point.

If you already love Y, this is essential. If you’re starting your dive into The Pop Group albums on vinyl, it’s a thrilling second stop that explains how a band from Bristol, working with a dub architect, turned punk’s open door into an entire labyrinth. Alien Blood isn’t a footnote. It’s the electricity humming behind the walls.