There are artists whose discographies resemble careers, and then there are artists whose discographies resemble evidence of an ongoing obsession. Julio Tornero belongs firmly to the latter category. Based in Valencia, Tornero has spent more than a decade moving through the city’s experimental and underground electronic worlds, appearing under a bewildering constellation of names including Polígono Hindú Astral, Tornische, Zotal, Dark Tibet and Madrelarva, as well as his own name. His history reaches back through projects such as Antiguo Régimen and a catalogue that has touched everything from coldwave and EBM to krautrock, ambient, noise and electro. A 2016 release, JT2, reduced his palette to stark, lo-fi electronics, drawing on the austere European traditions of industrial and coldwave; his 2019 Tornero pushed more explicitly into EBM, electro, industrial techno and krautrock. Tornero’s music has always seemed less interested in belonging to a particular scene than in investigating what happens when the machinery of those scenes begins to malfunction.
MINDLOCK, arriving October 2 through Valencia’s Industrial Complexx, feels like a particularly concentrated expression of that philosophy. Ten tracks form a kind of electronic pressure chamber, moving through EBM, electro, techno, darkwave, industrial and noise without ever allowing one genre to completely take control. “Asylum Playroom” and “Open Mouths” establish the record’s cold mechanical pulse, while “PNEU” and “Professionals” push deeper into Tornero’s fascination with repetition, machinery and synthetic texture. Elsewhere, “Cold Cold Transmissions,” “Iron Lung” and “Exterminate” suggest something more claustrophobic and ominous. Industrial Complexx describes MINDLOCK as a synthesis of the sonic universe Tornero has developed over more than ten years, and that seems apt: this isn’t a sudden stylistic detour but a distillation of the various strange electronic corridors he has been exploring all along.
There is something appropriately unsettling about MINDLOCK‘s title. A mind locked inside a machine—or perhaps a machine attempting to reconstruct a human mind—is an image that hangs over the record without ever needing to be stated. Tornero understands the hypnotic power of the beat, but he also understands that repetition can become disorientation; that a sequence can invite the body to move while simultaneously making the room feel less stable. This is where his background in experimental electronics gives the record its edge. MINDLOCK can function as EBM, darkwave or industrial music, but it doesn’t sound content to simply reproduce the familiar vocabulary of any of them. Instead, Tornero bends those languages toward something colder, stranger and more abstract. Released as a digital album and limited cassette by Industrial Complexx, it is another compelling artifact from an artist who has spent years working in the shadows between genres—and seems increasingly comfortable making those shadows his home.
MINDLOCK will be released October 2, 2026, via Industrial Complexx, available digitally and as a limited-edition cassette.