Buzz Kull

Fallen Flower to Fabrika

Buzz Kull has only ever been one person. Marc Dwyer started the project in Sydney in 2012 and has since handled synths, programming and percussion on everything released under the name. The first releases were self-issued — the EPs Fallen Flower in 2012 and Heat in 2013 — and from 2013 singles began appearing through Fabrika Records. There was no band to assemble and no line-up to lose, which is part of why the project has stayed in motion for fourteen years without a visible break.

What Dwyer settled on early was a narrow palette used hard: drum programming with weight on the downbeat, synth lines doing the work a guitar would do in a post-punk group, and a low vocal treated as another layer of the machine rather than something placed on top of it. Writers reaching for comparisons tend to land on electronic body music, minimal synth and darkwave at once, and all three are fair. The project's own description of the music — dark, dissonant and danceable — is unusually accurate for self-written copy, and the dance half matters: these are club records before they are mood records.

Three albums on Avant!

The records that built the audience came out on Avant! Records: Chroma in April 2017, New Kind of Cross in November 2018 and Fascination in November 2022. Across that run the production got cleaner and the songs shorter and more direct, but the catalogue works as one body of material rather than three distinct phases. Dwyer has also worked outside the project, with credits alongside Liars, Ellen Allien and Kontravoid.

The live record shows which songs took hold. By setlist.fm's count, Fascination has been played more than anything else — 22 logged performances — followed by Rise From Your Grave on 19 and Destination on 18. Into the Void, Avoiding the Light, Burn It to the Ground, Last in the Club and Dancing With Machines recur often enough to count as the working repertoire. Fascination and Rise From Your Grave have survived every change of label and billing since; they were in the set at The Chapel in San Francisco in February 2026 and still in it at HQ in Denver on 3 October.

That consistency has also been a ceiling. Three albums in five years on one independent label is a solid underground career rather than an expanding one, which is what makes the last eighteen months the most consequential stretch the project has had.

Cleopatra, then Heartworm

The first sign of a change came through a covers project. On 3 July 2025 Cleopatra Records issued Buzz Kull's version of The Human League's Darkness, from Dare, as a single ahead of the compilation The Black Album on 7 August. Dwyer was candid about what the song demanded: he said he was not prepared to deliver the theatrical intro of the original, and that for all the track's apparent simplicity the key changes were written for Philip Oakey's voice and are very hard to reproduce. It was a small release, and it put the name in front of a different audience.

The larger move was the label. By January 2026 Buzz Kull had signed with Heartworm Press, the imprint run by Cold Cave's Wes Eisold, for the next LP. What arrived first was Deep Hate, released on 13 February 2026 — four songs, Black Gate, In the Cut, Just a Memory and Human Force, with the CD and digital editions carrying remixes by PIG, Kontravoid, Cold Cave and Spike Hellis. Heartworm pressed it as a 45rpm 12-inch in black and white and in a limited Bloodlust marble edition; the CD has since sold out on Bandcamp. The label called it his most visceral and refined work to date. Destroy//Exist, reviewing it on 18 February, described industrial pop at its most distilled, built on tense percussion and harsh synth lines, and singled out Black Gate as the sharpest thing on the record. A video for In the Cut, directed by Chris Fatseas and featuring Dwyer opposite the Sydney model Andrea, followed on 26 August.

A year of almost continuous touring

The Heartworm connection translated straight into stage time. Cold Cave's West Coast run, announced on 10 January 2026, put Buzz Kull on as opener alongside the Berlin-based Rosa Anschütz: The Bellwether in Los Angeles on 13 February — the day Deep Hate came out — then Santa Ana, The Chapel in San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas, Tucson, the Neptune in Seattle and the Roseland in Portland on 28 February. Oregon Music News, previewing the Portland date, pointed at the gloomy dance style and the voice as the things carrying the set.

Europe came in late August: Thessaloniki on the 26th, Death Disco in Athens on the 27th and the Prague Gothic Treffen at Fuchs2 on the 29th. Then the biggest commitment in the project's history — a North American co-headline tour with Kontravoid, announced on 8 July, opening at Elysium in Austin on 10 September as part of Levitation and running through Texas, the South, the East Coast, Canada, the Midwest, the Rockies, the Pacific Northwest and California. Spike Hellis and Normal Bias were added for Spokane, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and Sacramento. The rooms were mid-sized bars and clubs throughout: Will's Pub in Orlando on 16 September at 20 to 25 dollars, the Funhouse at Mr Smalls in Pittsburgh, Icehouse in Minneapolis, the Biltmore Cabaret in Vancouver.

Two dates remain on sale as the run closes: 23 October at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and 24 October at the Belasco in Los Angeles, both staged under the SUBSTANCE banner, the Belasco show all-ages and standing. Australian dates follow in November — Volta in Ballarat on the 13th, a free show at the King Street Hotel in Newcastle on the 21st, and the UC Hub in Bruce on the 27th.

What the room gets

The clearest recent account of the live show comes from Saint Vitus in Brooklyn on 20 September, where the running order was Normal Bias, Kontravoid, then Buzz Kull closing. The reviewer, writing a week later, gave Dwyer the night's best set — more personality than the act before him, beats balanced against texture, with Skinny Puppy a reasonable comparison — and noted he was visibly working the synth rig rather than standing over it. The same review flagged the trade-off: the vocals run through thick effects and the words are often unrecoverable, a problem compounded by the sound in the venue's newly reopened room, which blurred vocals across all three acts.

Set length scales with billing. Supporting Cold Cave at The Chapel on 15 February, the set was seven songs — In the Cut, Just a Memory, Destination, Rise From Your Grave, Black Gate, Fascination and We Were Lovers — a shape that front-loads the new EP and keeps the older singles for the end. Headlining in Denver on 3 October it ran to ten. The staging is minimal and the stage is not shared: one man, a synth rig, and whatever the house can do with lights and fog. Orlando Weekly, previewing the Florida date, placed Buzz Kull and Kontravoid among the clearest examples of a revived electronic body music, and that is roughly the terms on which the tour has been received — a dance night rather than a recital, in rooms small enough to feel the low end.