NZ’s BRENDAN JOHN ROCH releases scorching new Election Year EP

Aotearoa’s Brendan John Roch follows his August full-length GOD DEFEND with a scorching, literary political rap record: Election Year is a Lenten sequence for a country going to the polls.

Brendan John Roch is a rapper whose restless, densely allusive rhymes work to pin down the meaning and the irony buried in contemporary political and cultural life. Raised in Ōtepoti Dunedin, he writes from an unusual set of vantage points: journalism, government operations, psychonautics, internet degeneracy, and Roman Catholicism. The result is technically masterful, abrasive writing that speaks to the universal beauty and vice with an unmistakable narrative voice.

Across five tracks, BJR’s Election Year EP is a vital, angry love letter to possibility in the midst of decline, turning a scorching critique on both the right’s extractive cruelty and the left’s timid managerialism. The record frames personal politics as a sustained effort toward hope and unknown futures: not naïve optimism, not blind allegiance, but a practice and a posture.

The production from BJR’s regular collaborator Mark Murray is drawn from the classical repertoire, and his compositional sensibility collides echoes of Late Romantic music with powerful 808s and shifting basslines to create an entirely original sonic experience. BJR’s sacred-to-profane register is its own kind of political percussion that makes managerial speech sound spiritually dead beside the record’s excess, vulgarity, and associative abundance.

Lead single ‘Marxist in the Middle’ is the record’s sharpest thesis: a furious reckoning with a left that has traded transformation for focus-grouped incrementalism, threaded through Aotearoa’s own radical lineage.

Brendan John Roch · Marxist in the Middle [LYRIC VIDEO]

1. Hopesoever
2. A Chain Offered to Demons
3. The Hollow Guard
4. Marxist in the Middle
5. Colours

Follow Brendan John Roch

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brendanjohnroch/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@brendanjohnroch

Website: https://brendanjohnroch.com/
Bandcamp: https://brendanjohnroch.bandcamp.com/
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brendanjohnroch
X: https://x.com/brendanjohnroch
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/brendan-john-roch/6784794526
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3O6zcnVqMEjeLxZCwzhetn
Tidal: https://tidal.com/artist/81734813