Kuantan, Malaysia unit Quarter Life, recently expanded to a sextet, returned last weekend with a new 3-track EP “Secret EP I:Death Of The Analog”, which departs significantly from last year’s piercing and urgent guitar-driven sophomore album, “Dance Motherfucker, Dance”, to deliver a possibly more personal shade of the band’s Post-punk-tinged Darkwave sensitivity, doused in shadowy and atmospheric tints glinting at the edges.
Taking cues from the most contemplative gloomy soundscapes of ’80s forebears to the most recent early Molchat Doma, Motorama and The KVB, the Southeast Asian collective has developed an immersive sound never aggressive, yet finely tweaked without losing consistency, built on a well-balanced interlacing of echoing emotive guitars, swirling evocative spacey synthesizers, chugging bass tones and mechanical rhythmic patterns, to provide airy lightness, introspection yet dynamism, deepened by a cold and brooding baritonal vocal delivery.
“Virtual Living Bodies”, lyric-wise, explores the loneliness, longing, and curiosity found in a virtual romance.
Retro-charged hypnotic repetitive snare drums and oscillating layers of vaporous buzzing low ends, interpolated with spindly, glistening wistful guitar melodies and shivering icy-bright synth drama, pulsating over soft, sad, heartfelt vocals aching to meet and do things, in person, with their online friend.
Find out about the poignant and penetrating, pain-fueled opening of “Altervision”, and the tauter and obsessive neon-flecked nocturnal urban vision of “Moon Night Pseudo”, you will definitely not regret it.
Keep up with Quarter Life: