Listening to “Panic Buttons,” the new single from the resurrected rave act Joe Average, feels like finding a party invitation tucked inside a government-issued emergency broadcast. It arrives with a grin, not a grimace. Thirty-four years is a long time to be quiet, and the Brighton trio of Rich, Mad Mick, and Prof have clearly spent their time away pondering the best way to face the abyss. Their answer, it seems, is with a four-to-the-floor beat and a complete, glorious refusal to be afraid.
The track builds on a bedrock of synth pulses that feel physically exhumed from a damp field in 1991, but this is no exercise in simple nostalgia. The production is sharp, coiled, and urgent. Then, a saxophone appears. It isn’t just a flourish; it’s a human, breathy wail cutting through the electronic perfection, a sound so unexpectedly alive it reminds me of the jarring scent of night-blooming jasmine on a sterile city street. It’s the sound of beautiful, messy life gate-crashing the orderly apocalypse.
With a cool, commanding vocal from Faber, the track doesn’t just suggest a hedonistic response to annihilation; it makes it sound like the only sane choice. To reject sterile instruction and instead turn the final moments into an ecstatic, intimate communion is presented as the ultimate act of defiance. For a band that effectively dissolved for over three decades, this theme of finding euphoric life at the edge of a void feels less like a concept and more like a hard-won truth. They’ve already danced their way back from one kind of oblivion.
The song leaves you with a strange, giddy serenity. It’s a rebellion of joy, an ecstatic two-step on the lid of a bunker. In the face of it all, who needs shelter when the beat is this good?
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