Maurice Engelen had already helped set new beat in motion as an Antler Records figure before he became Praga Khan, but nothing he'd done prepared Belgium for what he did next: a band built entirely around a joke about a 12-inch called "I Sit on Acid".
Formed in Antwerp in 1988, Lords of Acid began as Engelen, Oliver Adams and singer Nikkie Van Lierop — performing as Jade 4U — putting out sex-obsessed new beat singles for the Antler-Subway label. "I Sit on Acid" was a dancefloor hit before the trio had an album to their name; "Hey Ho!" followed, sampling Snow White's "Heigh-Ho" until the lawyers presumably objected. By the time Lust arrived in October 1991, the joke had become a genuine musical proposition.
Lust is the sound of new beat's mid-tempo, vaguely sinister groove pushed somewhere more explicit and more American: bigger drum programming, dirtier synth stabs, Van Lierop's vocals switching between deadpan come-on and outright command. "I Must Increase My Bust" and "Rough Sex" are as blunt as their titles promise, but the record's better trick is atmosphere — the queasy synth lines under "The Most Wonderful Girl" do more work than the innuendo.
It is not a subtle record.
That was rather the point. Where Belgian new beat's other producers — Morton, Sherman & Bellucci among them — worked in coded aliases and club-only pressings, Lords of Acid put the sleaze on the sleeve and courted attention outside Belgium. It paid off: Caroline Records picked the album up for wider release, and "The Most Wonderful Girl" later turned up on the soundtrack to Sliver. Lust became the record that carried new beat's DNA into industrial dance and EBM circles that never touched a Boccaccio dancefloor.
This remastered band edition doesn't tidy up that history so much as restate it at higher fidelity, which is the correct call: the appeal of Lust was never precision. Adams, credited for programming and mixing across the original, gave the record its low-end thickness; Van Lierop's performance still sounds like the whole point, arch and unbothered by the music's cartoonish horniness around her.
New beat itself burned out fast, curdling into the formulaic "nougat beat" its own scene mocked. Lords of Acid didn't. They kept releasing records, kept changing singers, kept the joke going longer than anyone at Boccaccio could have guessed in 1988 — and Lust remains the moment it stopped being a novelty and started being a career.
