I’m trying to remember what John Carpenter was actually about, which is harder than it sounds. I think I know. I think it was minimal synths and blank-faced evil and the sense that suburbia is one babysitter shift away from neighborhood collapse. But really, Carpenter was about mood as infrastructure. He made you believe that three notes on a keyboard could stalk you more effectively than a man with a knife. So the question becomes, if someone with an extreme synth obsession crawled into his head, could they build a better nervous system for those movies than he did himself?
Enter Carpenter Brut, the brainchild of French producer Franck Hueso. His sound feels reverse-engineered from the chrome-plated paranoia of Halloween—specifically the original’s synth minimalism, which suggested that evil doesn’t need a budget. Add in the digital melodrama of ’80s arcade cabinets and that hyper-saturated VHS horror aesthetic that now exists mostly as a collective hallucination, and you have one hell of a revisionist score.
He seems like an obvious genius in retrospect, which is usually how genius works. But I hadn’t heard of him until the lovely Zenae sent me a note about the third album, Leather Temple. I immediately assumed two things:
(1) It would be loud.
(2) Someone would be resurrected.
Both assumptions are correct, which is reassuring. I like when art meets my low expectations and then aggressively exceeds them.
Leather Temple concludes a trilogy that started with Leather Teeth and escalated with Leather Terror, which means this isn’t just an album—it’s IP. It completes a saga involving cyborg resurrection, authoritarian villains, and a rebellion led by someone named Lita Connor, who sounds less like a resistance leader and more like the bassist in a Sunset Strip band that never broke up because they never technically broke in. The antihero, Bret Halford, a name that feels algorithmically engineered to trigger heavy metal SEO, returns in 2077 to overthrow a tyrant called Iron Tusk.
If you’re thinking, “This sounds like a straight-to-streaming sci-fi movie that trends for 36 hours and then becomes a Halloween costume,” you’re not wrong. But that’s also the point. Carpenter Brut operates in the aesthetic Venn diagram where retro horror overlaps with EDM futurism. The press materials cite Carpenter and Dario Argento, which tracks. Both directors understood that mood outranks plausibility every time. There’s also DNA from Slayer and Justice, but refracted through the belief that the apocalypse will at least have better neon uplift.
Musically, Leather Temple is compact and punishing. Ten tracks. No filler. No robotic exposition explaining the stakes. The percussion sounds like someone dropping a toolbox down an elevator shaft inside a haunted WeWork. The synth lines oscillate between menace and a molly-fuelled drop kick to the face, often in the same breath. It’s aggressive but disciplined—like a nightclub brawl choreographed by someone with a minor in cybernetic architecture.
My top 3 tracks that make this a vinyl worth putting next to the Tron soundtracks are:
5. Start Your Engines- blistering nostalgia, very cinematic.
9. Speed or Perish- vividly electric, has very clear storytelling elegance.
2. Major Threat – feels more like a marching band show minus the sick snare lead up to acceleration.
Order Carpenter Brut’s new album, Leather Temple, at this location.
