I play dead every night
performing a life
I’m shattering glass
in your eyes
the smell of death
Germany’s Latex (Robin Lexow and Johanna Amberg) conjure a serrated synthesis of post-punk precision and volatile energy. Hailing from Darmstadt and forged in 2022, the duo sharpen their sound with nods to Cocteau Twins’ spectral haze, X-Mal Deutschland’s biting urgency, and The Cure’s brooding undercurrent. Their latest single, Defective, surges forward, a jagged meditation on autonomy and control, fusing fevered electronics with relentless rhythms. It’s a song wired for collapse and resurrection, a brutalist anthem for bodies that break, reboot, and refuse to bow to the weight of their own circuitry.
There’s a raw and restless desperation coursing through these lines, a plea wrapped in circuitry, a body rendered obsolete. The human form is a façade, a hollow shell housing something fractured, something flickering between life and lifelessness. The self becomes machinery, malfunctioning and in need of repair: reset, recharge, reconnect. There’s futility in the repetition, a mechanical rhythm that mimics the dull, unrelenting cycle of existence. Beneath it all, an ache…the longing to be more than a broken thing, to be treated as something worth fixing rather than something already beyond repair.
Directed by Johanna Amberg, the video thrashes between hysteria and precision, a performance caught in an endless loop of breakdown and repair. In an abandoned warehouse, she jerks and jolts in a suit, limbs flailing in a manic ballet before resetting—stiff, mechanical, a machine demanding maintenance. Soldering irons spark, circuits hum, a recalibration unfolds. Then, a shift: guitar in hand, she reboots in a new form, another iteration of the same system. It’s raw, relentless, a jagged meditation on autonomy and control, a biting commentary on performance, exhaustion, and the unspoken cost of always being switched on.
Watch the video for “Defective” below:
Listen to Defective below and order the single here.
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