An Excess of Hauntings turns absence into sound, and a book into a puzzle.
The Only Objects, an Adelaide art-rock trio led by Patrick Lang, released their second album An Excess of Hauntings nationally on 28 August, following it with a limited-edition art book and CD launch at Adelaide’s Low Life Basement Bar on 4 September. The record features former Kraftwerk percussionist Wolfgang Flür alongside producer Tim Whitt, light-painter Denis Smith and designer Jesse Miles, moving through post-punk, prog, trip hop and free jazz. Ginger Nuts of Horror looks at how a band that insists its ghosts are metaphors still built an album, and a book, that won’t let its own past settle.
The hauntings in the title aren’t apparitions so much as unfinished business: the people, places and imagined futures that keep exerting pressure long after they’re supposed to have let go. The things that haunt us are rarely supernatural.
The Only Objects Welcomes Wolfgang Flür for an Excess of Hauntings
For over a decade inside Kraftwerk, Wolfgang Flür helped build electronic sounds designed to feel like the future arriving on schedule. On An Excess of Hauntings, the sophomore album from Adelaide trio The Only Objects, he turns up on a record built from futures that never arrived at all.
The Only Objects, led by Patrick Lang alongside bassist Zacc Breheny and drummer Sam Menzel, released An Excess of Hauntings nationally on 28 August, following it with a launch show at Adelaide’s Low Life Basement Bar on 4 September. The album is their first full-length since their debut, The Nostomanic Cypher, a record about how you turn inward after a break-up. This one turns the lens outward. The limited-edition deluxe artbook + CD are available through the band directly, both at launch and online, alongside the album on standard streaming platforms.
“We’ve always embraced the conceptual in our music,” Lang says. “And the conclusion of our debut album The Nostomanic Cypher felt like we had taken the personal as far as it could go. The only direction to go was deeper, weirder, more ambitious. An Excess of Hauntings is all of these things and more.”
Produced by South Australian creative Tim Whitt, whose own catalogue runs from the field-recorded Geisel to the sample-heavy Heartache and Drumbreaks, the record refuses to sit still. It moves through post-punk, prog and trip hop, stacking synths and samples against free jazz saxophone and banjo, with walls of noise that periodically collapse on themselves.
The tracklist plays with that tension too. The Magnetbahn, Part II unfolds across several minutes of shifting movement; Isolated State drifts into trip hop, hushed and slow-moving, before Access Will Be Retained detonates into free jazz, with Jack Degenhart’s saxophone tearing through what had, until then, been a fairly composed art-rock groove.
None of which makes this a ghost record in any conventional sense. The hauntings in the title aren’t apparitions so much as unfinished business: the people, places and imagined futures that keep exerting pressure long after they’re supposed to have let go. That puts The Only Objects closer to hauntology in the technical sense, the term Jacques Derrida coined in 1993 and that critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds later adapted to describe music preoccupied with lost futures rather than actual ghosts. Flür’s presence only sharpens that reading. Here is a man who spent over a decade inside music that once sounded like tomorrow, now guesting on a record about the tomorrow that got cancelled.
The book pushes the hauntology idea into physical space. Jesse Miles, who has handled The Only Objects’ artwork since at least 2019, has built the object as a puzzle rather than a programme: narrative fragments scattered without a stated order, photographed throughout by light-painter Denis Smith, so that no two readers necessarily assemble the same story. It’s the sort of design horror readers will recognise from books that refuse to explain themselves outright, less a companion to the record than an accomplice in withholding it.
It’s a lot of moving parts for one release: a Kraftwerk veteran, a free jazz saxophonist, a light-painter and an unsolved book, all orbiting a band determined to bring something unique to the table. The Only Objects have built an album, and an artefact, that won’t let either go quietly.
ALBUM RELEASE DETAILS
Album: An Excess of Hauntings
Artist: The Only Objects
National streaming release: Friday 28 August 2026
Physical release: Limited-edition art book + CD
ABOUT THE ONLY OBJECTS
The Only Objects is a South Australian alternative-rock project led by Patrick Lang, combining rock, electronic and experimental music with long-form storytelling and visual performance.
Their debut album, The Nostomanic Cypher, explored personal memory and identity. An Excess of Hauntings takes those ideas outward – towards lost futures, cultural memory and the things that remain when something else has disappeared.
Jim "The Don" McLeod has been reading horror for over 35 years and reviewing it for more than 16. He's the editor of Ginger Nuts of Horror, Europe's largest independent horror review and culture site, and a British Fantasy Award nominee for his work in the genre. When he's not busy inflicting his opinions on the horror community, he can be found annoying his family or getting thoroughly outwitted by his two dogs, Casper and Molly.
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