INFRA HANDS: a debut album that refused a second take
The debut record by Belgrade quartet INFRA HANDS is out today on Discom. Ten songs cut in a home studio, every one of them a first take, with no editing and no touch-ups afterwards.
Every musician knows the moment: the take is finished, something in it is not quite clean, and a quiet negotiation begins over whether the rough edge gets repaired or gets to stay. The Belgrade quartet INFRA HANDS never opened that negotiation. All ten songs on the debut album „U kišama meteora”, out on vinyl on August 1, 2026, were kept as first takes, with no editing afterwards and no corrective work of any kind.
The record comes out on Discom, an independent label that releases and distributes lesser-known music from the former Yugoslavia. The material was made in a home studio over several weeks, out of spontaneous jam sessions. That single fact says more about the sound than any genre label would, because it rules out everything modern production takes for granted: quantised timing, stacked vocal layers, pitch correction applied after the fact.
Who plays on the record?
Four musicians whose paths had not crossed until now, each carrying a different chapter of the Serbian scene.
- Dejan Stanisavljevic, synthesizers and programming, known for the band Beograd, with which he pushed into then-uncharted electronic territory in the early 1980s
- Zoran Kiza Radovic, vocals and guitars, previously with Presing and Zenit Zed, and long regarded as an alternative poet speaking for his generation
- Sana Garic, synthesizers and backing vocals, known for her work in Svemirci
- Aleksandra Bengin, cello, the youngest of the four, who put out her own debut album last year
The band came together on a single night in early 2026, when Stanisavljevic and Radovic decided to build music around Radovic’s poetry. Garic and Bengin joined shortly afterwards. The usual order is reversed here: the words came first and the arrangement followed, rather than the other way round.
What a first take actually commits you to
Refusing to record anything twice is an editorial position rather than a technical quirk, and it changes what a listener can reasonably expect. A first take keeps the breathing, the pause that runs a beat too long, the finger that arrives late on a key. What standard production files away as material to be fixed becomes part of the composition here, for the simple reason that no alternative version exists.
The choice of instruments left exposed by that method is more telling still. Synthesizers and programming absorb improvisation without strain, since a machine never tires. A cello is a different proposition: it registers every hesitation in live playing, and putting it inside an electronic setup means letting that hesitation onto the tape on purpose. Hence the wording the label chose.
The album is marked by the extraordinary artistic courage of the four musicians.
In the same statement, Discom says the record carries listeners, dream-like, into the deepest and most intimate reaches of introspection. The phrasing belongs to a label announcement, but the working method behind it is verifiable by ear: the album is a long way from over-produced.
A label that dug up an archive, then let it speak
The most interesting part of the story is not audible on the record at all. Discom has spent years pulling Yugoslav electronic music of the 1980s back out of obscurity, and its catalogue holds the compilation „Synth-Pop Yugoslavia 1983-86” by Oskarova Fobija alongside a release titled „Mrak” by Beograd, Stanisavljevic’s own band. The catalogue is, in effect, the archive of a scene.
Then a man from inside that archive turns up at the same label with a new album recorded a few weeks ago, in the present tense. A house built on reissues stops being purely a museum and becomes a place where the scene continues. That distinction is worth naming, because most labels living off their back catalogue never leave it.
One question is left to listeners. A record with no advance singles, no editing and no production compromises asks for a kind of attention that current listening habits rarely supply, and the payoff is not guaranteed. If you want to hear what Serbian electronic music sounds like once the option of fixing it is taken away, this is the one album released this year that answers directly.
