Belgian post-punk veterans The Names have followed up their 2025 album with a remix companion on Spleen+, the post-punk arm of Alfa Matrix. “Balancing Chaos (RMXing The Names)” holds 17 tracks and comes on CD in a digipack as well as in a digital version.
Two songs have videos: the Hard Facts remix of “Procrastination” and “Far From The Factories”, the single that also closes the album. Both clips are embedded below.
The CD digipack is available now on the Alfa Matrix store, and the digital album sits on the band’s own Bandcamp page.
Thirteen remixes, four originals
The record reworks songs from “Encore!”. Alongside the 13 remixes it includes four untouched album versions, which are “Apophenia”, “Last Train From Nowhere”, “Watching For The New World” and, as the closer, “Far From The Factories”. Digital pre-orders came with two advance remixes: Gil Robert’s retrofuturistic mix of “Last Train From Nowhere” and Hard Facts’ take on “Procrastination”.
Who remixed what
“Last Train From Nowhere” is reworked by several hands, among them Gil Robert (the retrofuturistic version) and Mike Theis, whose credits include work with Tricky and Massive Attack and who contributes a “morecowbell” remix. Gil Robert also stretches “Apophenia” into an extended dark electro-pop piece and recasts “Swimming With Brian Jones” as ambient electro.
Jean-Marc Lederman’s rework of “Watching For The New World” is dedicated to the late Annik Honoré, and the Kyiv-based producer Hard Facts gives “Procrastination” a club-minded makeover, building on earlier work for the “Procrastination” EP. Rounding out the remixers are Error Fate, Diskodiktator, Rob G. Nichols, Halcyon Loop, Eden and Nevel (featuring Reverend Basstorius); after them, the album versions put the songs back into the band’s own arrangements.
About The Names
The Names were founded in Brussels in 1978, evolving from an earlier local outfit, The Passengers. The core of three consisted of Michel Sordinia (bass, vocals, songwriting), guitarist Marc Deprez and Christophe Den Tandt on drums and keyboards, while Robert Frankson and Isabelle Hanrez were involved only briefly early on.
WEA released the first single, “Spectators of Life”, in 1979. A Joy Division concert in Brussels was followed by a signing to Factory Records, and in 1980, with drummer Luc Capelle on board, they recorded “Nightshift” in Manchester under producer Martin Hannett. The album “Swimming” arrived in 1982, the year of their BBC session for John Peel, which was later released digitally as “Radio Session 1982”.
Following the break-up in the mid-1980s, Sordinia and Deprez continued as Jazz (album “Nightvision”), and archival reissues on labels such as LTM and Factory Benelux kept the early recordings circulating. A Brussels event at Plan K in 2007, “A Factory Night (and then again)”, brought The Names back to the studio. Albums and sets since then include “Monsters Next Door” (2009), “Stranger Than You” (2015), the live “German Nights” (2018) and “Hidden Tracks” (2021).
Spleen+, the Alfa Matrix sub-label, has been the band’s home since 2024. Titles issued there include the digital “Procrastination” EP, the “Swimming With Brian Jones” EP, the album “Encore!”, the “Volume” EP and the single “Far From The Factories”. Further coverage of the band: The Names archive.