Gary Numan- Intruder

“Underrated” is one of those terms that everyone throws around, but Gary Numan seems appropriate to use it. The first four Numan/Tubeway Army albums are as solid as you might hope from any artist in a roughly two year period.

Although Numan famously had a second career in aviation, he really never stopped making albums. As opposed to most artists with a 40-plus year career, there really aren’t any gaps.

Artists have embraced Numan throughout the years, the most visible being Nine Inch Nails, but also a disparate group that includes Fear Factory, the Orb, Marilyn Manson, Tool, Nirvana and J Dilla.

I dipped back into Numan in the early Aughts but did not stay with his new material. What I missed was the buzz that began to generate with 2013s Splinter and continued with 2017s Savage- theme albums that inhabited a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Electronic sounds of course informed by plenty of Influences from all over the world.

One Intruder won’t replace say, Replicas, but it’s an intriguing listen. I’m struck immediately by two things. First, it feels very much like a Numan album in that it would surely be recognizable to any time traveler who might have happened across it in the Tubeway Army days

Second, there are a ton of electro influenced albums out there. After the success of Nine Inch Nails, similar albums flooded the market. It’s not just NIN of course, and it’s not just one genre, but just a ton of post NIN/Marilyn Manson/Smashing Pumpkins electro rock, and Numan doesn’t get any special treatment because he predates them all.

That said, despite a bit of lack in song-to-song variety (maybe more in time than instrumental variety, every song is a bit of a downer) it is a pretty solid genre album. If anyone can pull off the detached outsider from another world, it’s Numan and the music competently backs him up.

While it has too many flaws to be considered in the same conversation as Low or Station to Station, or even Holy Wood, it is an interesting piece of work.