<p><span><span>- <strong>Jack McAlister</strong>, aka Willaris. K, first emerged in 2017 as an apprentice electrician who in his spare time crafted dark, eerie slices of atmospheric techno from his northern NSW bedroom. Three years later, McAlister has been touring the world and gaining internet hype. <em>Lustre</em> is the first of two EPs planned for release in the next few months.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>While <em>Lustre</em> does find Willaris. K branching out for the first time into vocal collaborations, the two songs featuring guest vocalists are pretty forgettable. It is the brooding, eerie, minimal techno that is what he does best, and to be honest there's never been a time when it sounded more apt than right now.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Willaris. K's best songs always were theoretically for the nightclub, but seemed to best evoke the trip home - tired, coming down, cruising through empty, artificially lit streets. Like you are in some detached state, observing a vacant world you're not a part of.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>What was once an experience reserved for the nocturnal types is becoming much more universal. In mid-afternoon I put <em>Lustre</em> on my headphones and went for a walk through the empty streets of semi-suburban Brisbane, and it felt like we had finally moved into the world evoked in a Willaris K. song. Haunting and minimal were the adjectives I would use not just for the songs, but also the surroundings I walked through.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>The song titles also evoke emptiness and disconnection: <em>Indifferent</em>, <em>Detach</em>, <em>Past Light</em>. <em>Cobaki Sky </em>recalling the rural area around where McAlister is based in Northern NSW. It's a record full of aloneness, emptiness, feelings of disconnection.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>In that way it speaks perfectly to our zeitgeist right now. Not that McAlister could have predicted our world when he wrote these songs; it's more like the experience customarily reserved for the nocturnal wanderer, the detached observer, the young man spending all his time crafting beautiful techno songs in his bedroom; this experience is now the day to day life of so many of us in perpetual isolation. Fortunate then, I guess, that we have some banging new tracks from Willaris. K to at least give us an appropriate soundtrack.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>- Andy Paine.</span></span></p>
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