Collapsing Scenery is excavated from the brilliantly fevered imaginations of LA provocateur Reggie Debris and Philly underground icon Don Devore. Together they concoct a cauldron bubbling with electronic discord, airy elegance, sardonic political wit, global ennui, punk spirit, and disco delirium, with generous splashes of shoegaze and acid for good measure. It’s the sort of music that happens when genre boundaries politely leave the room, exhausted.
Their guest list of collaborators reads like the after-party you wished you attended: Genesis P-Orridge rubbing elbows with Jamaican dancehall royalty Ninjaman and Tippa Lee, Jennifer Herrema trading barbs with Palestinian rappers DAM, no-wave renegade James Chance sipping cocktails alongside Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto fame, and avant-pop visionaries Avalon Lopez De Magaña and L’ESPIRAL mixing metaphors at the punch bowl.
With Magic Button, off the upcoming album Stand-Up Tragedy, Collapsing Scenery hits fresh peaks of sonic and lyrical exploration. There’s a thrilling schizophrenia here, shifting seamlessly from blaring waves of analogue bedlam to feather-light whispers of tenderness. Their lyrics, intricately layered and steeped in sharp cultural nods, unfold like frantic postmodern poetry…imagine the Beatles during their White Album phase conspiring with Throbbing Gristle and Frank Tovey, overseen by the phantasmagoric presence of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaffer.
“‘Pressing the magic button’ is old CIA slang for assassination,” says Reggie Debris. “This is a song about unintended consequences, blowback, and imperial hubris. After decades of engendering insurgencies, rogue states, rebellions and civil wars, we have learned no lessons from our myriad foreign policy failures. We are caught in an endless cycle of retribution and reaction, punctuated by hasty attempts at cleanup and moral grandstanding.”
Charlotte Ercoli’s striking visuals for Magic Button further escalate the delightful confusion, channeling decades of foreign policy misadventures into an urgent commentary on the endless cycles of insurgency, rebellion, and reaction. A surrealist…well, really, Dadaist…romp unfolds: a Peter Lorre cartoon furiously pounds piano keys, a jittery nightcap-clad gentleman squirms in existential dread, and a mysterious lady of dubious origins moonlights bizarrely as a chiropractor. Libraries offer no sanctuary here; escape is futile…and these poor souls in the video echo the cyclical madness of misguided global intervention.
In 2025, as we sift through the rubble of modern civilization, Collapsing Scenery holds court, calling unapologetically for amplified rage and abundant affection, furiously juxtaposing chaos with clarity, irony with earnestness. The duo has crafted a musical séance that conjures your inner imp, shakes you by the lapels, and insists (with wicked charm) that the end of the world could, after all, be one hell of a good party.
Watch the video for “Magic Button” below:
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Collapsing Scenery has been holding true to their ambitions with this latest effort: to create a truly new music that speaks directly to the anxieties of the time, swathed in arresting visuals, and harbouring a deep commitment to calling out abuses of power wherever they arise.
“The mission statement was always to be pretty overt in our politics and fairly activist as a band,” says Debris, “but lyrically I’ve gotten a little bit more oblique than I was at the beginning. Maybe that’s just my own perception of it, but I feel like part of that comes from the strange dream world aspect of modern life that I’m describing. I’ve come to realize over the years that sometimes pure abstraction or obliqueness or poetry is the only way to really make sense of the insanity that you’re faced with.”
Stand-Up Tragedy holds a cracked and dirty mirror up at the wreckage that is the world in 2025, as well as their own lives within it. Away from the music, the lyrics are, as usual, hyper-literate screeds wrapped in layers of cultural reference and raw human emotion. Yet while the purpose of the band has stayed relatively resolute over the years, their application and approach has shifted and evolved. Stand-Up Tragedy is their latest incarnation and manifestation, designed to help make sense of a world that makes less and less sense each and every day.
“This record is definitely born of a lot of personal pain,” admits Debris. “And it was very much a Covid record, too, so there’s an apocalyptic feeling behind it all—there was, honestly, a thought that making music or art felt almost pointless in some way. Everyone and everything was so hermetically sealed and we were all unsure if we’d ever actually be able to put stuff out or perform again, so the idea of performative tragedy just really fit the of mood of the album.”
Stand Up Tragedy will be released on September 5th, with pre-orders available here. Pre-save the album here.
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