Trabajando El Flex: A Track-by-Track Guide to Sexo y Fantasia’s new LP

This is their third record, and easily their darkest. Where previous outings luxuriated in sun-drenched haze, *Trabajando El Flex* thrives in the murk – a mutant wave manifesto that channels Coil’s spirit through pulsing basslines and ghostly vocals. New Beat, EBM, Dub, Italo, and New Wave collapse into each other here, creating something hypnotic and beautifully unclean. It’s music for darkrooms, both literal and metaphorical.

The duo’s world is gloriously unhinged: Bear-Santa Claus fantasms rub shoulders with burning churches; ketamine mantras become grooves; the Devil gets his own dub tribute. Nothing’s sacred, everything’s game, and the lyrics – improvised, absurd, never to be taken seriously – dictate the chaos. Mixed by Jonathan Pardede and mastered by Rude 66, it’s a flawless fit for Pinkman’s after-hours universe.

Here, soFa elsewhere and Nicolas Boochie guide us through the beautiful wreckage, track by track.

1.⁠ ⁠Last Hsit
“Last Hsit” began as a mistake, literally. It’s the original Ableton file name, typo included, and the only one that survived the purge. What came out of those first sessions was a smear of esoteric dark-ambient tension. It’s that moment when you step into a basement and realise the walls are sweating slightly, and maybe you are too. A ritual without instructions.

2.⁠ ⁠Jingle Bears
Our Christmas carol for people who never survive Christmas sober. The whole thing was born from a single tinkling sound which instantly derailed us into the world of a Bear-Santa Claus. We never write lyrics in advance; we just pass the mic around while jamming (usually in an altered state) and let whatever idiot poetry emerges dictate the rest. Sometimes the words shape the sounds; sometimes the sounds inspire the words. Here, the tinkling bells won. A festive hallucination where nothing is sacred and everything jingles.

3.⁠ ⁠The Symbol of Dance
Probably the closest we’ve ever come to some kind of new-wave anthem, though still dipped in our lo-fi, DIY murk. soFa improvised the lyrics on the spot and somehow the whole thing ended up sounding like a lost hit from a parallel universe where the Top 40 is programmed by somebody with a taste for alienated, disobeying music. It’s our crooked Depeche Mode wanna-be moment.

4.⁠ ⁠The Room
This one came straight from a night out. Boochie had just returned from a Gay Haze night in Brussels, still laughing about a friend who, while dancing high on ketamine, started screaming: “I’m in the room! I’m in the room!”. When we hit record later that evening, it was the first thing that came out of his mouth. “The Room” is that sensation of slipping sideways, of being very much there and not there at the same time. A ketamine mantra turned groove.

5.⁠ ⁠Il Dub Del Diavolo
The Devil arrived early for this one. As soon as the bassline landed, we knew the track belonged below sea level. Sulphurous, smoky, sinful. To write the lyrics, Boochie opened an online Italian dictionary and started freestyling through every term tied to “devil,” “diabolic,” “infernal,” whatever the algorithm spat out. Total randomness disguised as intent. It sounds a bit like those old disco or boogie tracks where lyrics reference the genre itself. Our very own “Disco Inferno” but here it’s filtered through a dark dub fog, creating a perfect contradiction. Contrast has always been our guiding star, and on this track it points straight to the underworld.

6.⁠ ⁠Mosquito Attraction
Some attractions are universal; this one isn’t. A single buzzing synth set off the chain reaction, the kind of sound that crawls under your skin and reminds you of humid nights spent slapping at invisible enemies. We thought: why not dedicate a love song to the one attraction we both despise? “Mosquito Attraction” is the romance of irritation, the eroticism of discomfort, a dance between you and those tiny creatures who always win. The closer you listen, the more it itches.

7.⁠ ⁠Stop:Time
“Stop:Time” is where things fracture. It’s the soundtrack to that moment in the night when perception starts looping and your brain decides to operate on a different timeline. We leaned into the broken logic of it: rhythms that feel stretched, frozen, then snapped back into place; melodies that hint at urgency but never resolve. It’s an invocation for stalled clocks and elongated shadows, a reminder that time glitches the moment you loosen your grip. On “Stop:Time”, we try to expose that glitch.

8.⁠ ⁠Burning Churches
Our anticlerical closing credits. This one literally started with soFa grabbing the mic and blurting out “burning churches” for no apparent reason. Boochie instantly piled on with a line he remembered from an old Italian Communist Party election poster parodying a soap advert: “to remove the stains of clerical corruption.” We love the absurd audacity of that line. “Burning Churches” isn’t about actual arson. It’s symbolic cleansing, a final exorcism to end the album. A strange little dub lullaby, wobbling its way toward forgiveness… Or at least a cease-fire with our blasphemy.

Trabajando El Flex is out now on on the excellent Pinkman digi and vinyl here