Release Date: 2 May 2025
Song Count: 8
Duration: 29 minutes, 47 seconds
Rating: 7.4/10
Description:
Here comes NCY Milky Band, a band from Nancy, France with their fifth and most recent venture into their particular flavour of combining genres and creating unique sound palettes, as they are branded for doing. Ok No Club, like many of their other works, is described as a blend between electronica, jazz, rock, funk and a load of other styles of music that come together to assemble a certain atmosphere and collection of songs uncontainable in the confines of one musical category or the other. With the combined works of members Treffel, Léonardon, Thomas and Lefèvre, the end result is an album with 8 tracks that invokes different experiences and mental images while challenging the notions of conventional music.
From an abstract space far beyond the limits of ordinary imagination to distant memories from the past, the record transports the listener into all sorts of metaphorical realms purely through the power of its music. Keys and synths as well as bass and percussions trail along to make tracks that obtain unique feels as if it is a soundtrack of a movie or video game of some sorts, and that radiate an energy that, though difficult to capture and put into cohesive words, is nearly impossible to ignore when listening to the tracks. The blend of many genres to the point where it becomes a non-possibility to pinpoint one specific primary influence or style only adds to the abstract and surreal touch of the album's contents, and makes them overall intentionally disorienting yet endlessly intriguing to listen to and sit through at once.
For a band of their levels of niche and size in audience, NCY Milky Band does manage to impress with the work put into Ok No Club and the quality found within it as a result, and for that, they more than earn their praises, even with not every single track in the album hitting the self-set ceiling of quality. Just falling short of 30 minutes in total runtime is the only other thing potentially holding the project back from being a true eye-opening listen rather than simply a solid assortment of songs with glimpses of further immaculacy, though as it stands now, the results are still nothing to sneeze at by any means. Definitely something fresh and fascinating to tune into when the mood and occasion calls for it.