Runes Order – No Future (Eighth Tower Records, 2026 Reissue)
Some records don’t return so much as seep out of the firmament like a will-o’-the-wisp, never quite burned out, finally drifting back into view. ‘No Future,’ first released in 1993 in a run of just thirty hand‑numbered cassettes, is one of those artefacts: a tape whispered about in the Italian industrial underground, half‑myth, half‑memory, and long assumed to be one of those releases destined to remain a rumour. Its reappearance now feels less like a reissue and more like a breach in the timeline.
Runes Order – known until shortly before as Order 1968 – had spent the late ’80s and early ’90s working in ritual‑industrial terrain: pagan myth, ancestral dread, hypnotic loops, all the fun stuff. But ‘No Future’ is the moment the project’s axis tilts. The reissue notes describe it as the first work of “clearly cosmic origin”, and that’s exactly how it feels: the ritual circle still intact, but scorched, irradiated, and suddenly open to the void.
The concept is brutally simple: the nuclear nightmare, but viewed from the “day after”, not the flash, not the fireball, but the wandering through what’s left. It’s a Cold War hangover rendered as a soundscape, a camera drifting through rubble, unsure whether it’s documenting or scribbling an obituary. In 2026, that perspective feels uncomfortably current again, the Doomsday Clock a nose hair from midnight.
The album opens with ‘Floating Frames’, nine minutes of suspended dread. It’s a slow drift through smoke and static, the sonic equivalent of dust motes slowly somersaulting in dead light. The drones are roughened, minor‑key, and strangely intimate, like someone humming through a respirator. This isn’t music about the apocalypse, but music made inside it.
From there, the record begins to mutate. ‘Attack’ and ‘Infernal Trial’ introduce a more corporeal pulse, not a rhythm as such, but the suggestion of mechanical momentum and something still running somewhere beneath the ruins. ‘Bridges Over Europe’ feels like a transmission from a continent already lost, a pigeon’s wing flapping against an abandoned radio post. The title track, ‘No Future’, is the first real crescendo: eight minutes of rising tension, a slow‑motion detonation that never quite resolves. It’s the sound of a world collapsing politely, as if trying not to disturb the neighbours.
Side B is where the album’s conceptual spine becomes unmistakable. ‘Ruins Theme’ punctuates the mist with a seemingly never-ending bell chime, a call for the dead that’s going to take quite some time to round everyone up. It speaks of the realisation that truly everything we held dear has been lost, even when a light melody kicks in. It’s the cockroaches mocking us. ‘Un Passaggio Nel Cielo’ and ‘Volo (Dream Sequence)’ push further into the cosmic, almost weightless in their drift, as if the camera has floated up from the rubble and into the irradiated sky. But it’s ‘A Nightmare (Is Coming)’ that delivers the album’s most intense moment, a savage smack to the face that clarifies that the devastation isn’t hypothetical and there’s no magic reset button.
‘Media Lies’ is the closest the album comes to explicit commentary, though the music itself remains oblique, more a smouldering, belched accusation than a statement. And then the record closes with ‘No Future (Ending Sequence)’, a final sweep across the ruins, a last look at what’s left. It’s strangely elegiac, almost tender, like the Iron Giant looking at crushed human remains in its fingers, an embarrassed naivety breaking into horrified resignation.
What’s striking, listening now, is how No Future manages to feel both of its era and ahead of it. The lo‑fi edges, the tape hiss, the hand‑assembled feel – all of that places it firmly in the early ’90s industrial underground. But the thematic clarity, the cinematic pacing, the cosmic drift: those point forward, toward the post‑apocalyptic ambient works that would proliferate in the decades to come. You can hear the lineage.
I’ve managed to get all the way here without mentioning the film, ‘Threads’, but it would be ridiculous not to. There’s none of the Sheffield kitchen sink here, but neither is this a cheap, horror‑ambient packaging of sounds under a helpful banner – there are no ‘it was all a dream’ or ‘hope springs eternal’ codas – it’s all very, very bad news. Runes Order captured that feeling in 1993, on a tape most people would never hear. Three decades later, it feels less like a relic and more like a message we weren’t ready for.
Daz Lawrence