There is something fascinating in getting your new album released in September on vinyl only with no direct sign of a CD release. It functions as a direct emblem of dance-culture: get the tracks to the DJ's first so they can do damage on the dance floor, then put it out a half year later on CD for home-listening. In another smart move Digital Nation is presented as a loose mix-CD of the original tracks with some new exclusive material, so the flow and intensity is never broken by awkward pauses. I must confess I approached this quick follow-up to Bad Company's banging debut, Inside the Machine, with some fear of finding just another collection of mega hard drum 'n bass tracks. And so the actual music comes as a welcome surprise.

What Digital Nation presents is something beyond drum 'n bass, something close to meta-rave. The opening title track introduces the template: a skipping beat, a deadpan female voice and those rapid acid-bleeps that have you throwing shapes with your fingers on the dance floor. In quick succession you'll hear rolling metal tubes, those filtered waves of sound that work as the equivalent of being momentarily lost in smoke and strobe-light, followed by the welcome return of the mighty Amen-break. The voice samples are impeccable throughout the album: from cheesy Twilight Zone intro, voices floating through the mix, to utterances that are ripped out of digital torture devices.

This is of course as much drug music as The Velvet Underground, but rather in a direct physical manner more than a symbolic one. The music almost demands you hear it in a club, your eyes popping out your head, shivers running down your spine, a sweaty fist in the air greeting the next bass drop. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the closing Son of Nitrous, an astonishing remake of their masterpiece Nitrous, which somehow gets me all misty-eyed. Those high synth-stabs bring back forgotten ghosts of pleasure, the brilliant memories of rave are suddenly all alive and then there is that bass: monstrous, sublime, propelling you into blissful abandon.

And that's where you really enter Digital Nation, not a pipe-dream of dancing cyborgs but an imaginative land of minds blown by rave, whose inhabitants have more in common with each other in the imagination, in dreams, in ecstasy than for instance people you meet in the streets or any other boring, outdated notion of community. The new cartographers are these four guys named Bad Company. They paint with bass and distortion, they catch the rhythms of your darkest dreams and complete the adaptation of your whole body to the endless knowledge systems of rave. (www.bcrecordings.co.uk)