August 20, 2026

alarm!systemen turn six years of tape recordings into a debut album for Antibody

Brussels project alarm!systemen released its self-titled ten-track debut album on the Belgian label Antibody on July 31, 2026, mastered by Yannick Franck.

alarm!systemen self-titled debut album cover art by Yesse Hoedemaekers

Artwork: Yesse Hoedemaekers

🇺🇦 Side-Line stands with Ukraine - Show your Support

The Brussels project alarm!systemen released its self-titled debut album on the Belgian label Antibody on July 31, 2026. Jorne Leurs wrote, played and sang all ten tracks, which mix minimal synthpop lines with cold wave drum machines and Dutch and English lyrics. Yannick Franck mastered the record and Yesse Hoedemaekers supplied the artwork. It is out digitally on Bandcamp at 24-bit resolution; no physical edition has been pressed.

What alarm!systemen collected on the debut album

The album is an assembly rather than a studio session. Leurs describes it as material gathered over six years: “alarm!systemen is a project that was built over many years and originally meant as an audio diary, meant just to process certain events in my life through the lens of my favorite musical genres since childhood. From a very young age, I was inspired by the soundtrack of both the glitter and gloom of the 80s. My first self-titled release features tracks, cassette recordings, and improvisations made between 2019 and 2024.”

That span shows in the running order, which moves between short pop shapes and long-form pieces. The ten tracks are “Kapot” (4:48), “Answer Me” (6:04), “BURN” (4:00), “Comple X” (5:37), “Dance With Me” (3:56), “Eindeloos” (8:16), “Fade To Dust” (4:03), “Goes Again” (6:34), “Three” (5:15) and “Void” (7:14). Four of them pass the six-minute mark, and “Eindeloos” is the longest at over eight minutes.

Antibody describes the record as existential synthpop and cold wave. No official video has been released and the album is not on Spotify.

About Antibody and alarm!systemen

alarm!systemen has no earlier release history. This album is its first published work, and Leurs has not documented other projects. What is on record is the account he gives on the release page: the material began as private processing and was never conceived as an album.

Antibody operates out of Brussels and is run by Yannick Franck, who records as RAUM. Its first release, Damon Raum’s “Tantale”, appeared on December 4, 2020, and the catalogue has since grown to around fifty titles. The label describes itself as “a label specializing in de(con)structed forms of Techno, New Wave, EBM, Industrial, Dark Ambient, Sound Art, Metal and Noise”.

Franck is a Liège-born sound artist based in Brussels whose own work runs through the projects Y.E.R.M.O. with Xavier Dubois, Orphan Swords with Pierre de Mûelenaere, and Figure Section with Olivia Carrère. He also founded the Idiosyncratics label and scored the 2023 film “The Belgian Wave”.

Side-Line has followed Antibody since its early years, covering Hypnoskull launches all new single ‘TMKF’ on the Belgian Antibody label in May 2022, Lebanese electro project Maltash lands new EP on Antibody label in August 2022 and Brussels based label Antibody to release Jean Baudrillard inspired ‘Fatal Strategies’ compilation in March 2023. The alarm!systemen album sits at the synthpop end of that catalogue rather than the techno and noise end.

Since you’re here …

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading Side-Line Magazine than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can - and we refuse to add annoying advertising. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.

Side-Line’s independent journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we want to push the artists we like and who are equally fighting to survive.

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as 5 US$, you can support Side-Line Magazine – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.

The donations are safely powered by Paypal.

Select a Donation Option (USD)

Enter Donation Amount (USD)