Track Of The Day SOCIAL YOUTH CULT
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK newcomers Social Youth Cult combine 80s-inspired, moody, intense and stripped-down Post-punk with dark and gloomy Gothic Rock, conjuring energy, immediacy, melancholia and existential lyrics, to shake the North East of England doomy darkwave music scene.
The four-piece, made up of Shaun Greer (lead vocalist, guitar), Holly Moore (guitar), Alex Thibaut (drums, vocalist) and Jack Stephenson (bass), follows last May’s debut 5-track EP “Memento Vivere” with the new Double A-Side single “Black Lipstick/Different Language”, as usual, ‘recorded in 2 hours and mixed over 2 days’.
A dark fetishy romance about feeling alive where passion and pain entwine, “Black Lipstick (Clings to Me)” is driven by a tight, boisterous and rumbling drumming, woven with a crisp, sinuously thrumming bassline, carved through by both sharp and atmospheric, swirling reverb-filled electricity of shrieking wailing guitar bleeds, wandering around haunted croons, obsessing over the “Black Lipstick” left behind.
More angsty and vulnerable against the colder and subtly longing opener, the flip sparks off again with a relentlessly propulsive, clattering pace, bleak meandering bass, and searingly abrasive, at times jagged, guitar riffage, to frame a compelling, equally terse and expressive, sullen vocal delivery, breaking midway into frustrated cries, before finding comfort in another speaking the same language.
Another exhilarating work-in-progress young collective to keep a close eye on.
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