To invite another into one’s life is to open the front door of one’s fragile little kingdom, and risk finding mud on the carpet. Yet, to remain alone is to sit in spotless silence, polished but desolate. The tension is eternal: solitude might keep one unruffled, but also untouched. Companionship may bruise, but it also affirms our existence. We fear intrusion, yet crave witness. To let someone in is to gamble with chaos, but also with the possibility of communion. And really, what is life if not the delicious terror of being seen, and still being allowed to stay?
Viva Non’s new single, Haunting Me, rises like a midnight ritual, conjured from the very depths of the soul — elusive yet undeniable, alive with restless electricity. Following his return to synth-pop with July’s With Love, James Hofer delivers a fervent new track driven by a pounding bassline, effervescent yet exacting, carrying the shimmer of Erasure, the solemn weight of Depeche Mode, and the crystalline poise of the Human League. With its passion and restraint, it feels less like a song than an incantation, a pulse summoned to illuminate the void.
Beneath the surface lies an austere control, a discipline as cold as glass. The tempo locks into Kraftwerk’s mechanical precision, a synth pulse steady as machinery idling in the dark. Then, klaxons shiver across the mix — sharp enough to raise goosebumps, like a warning carried on frozen air. The melody flickers with fragile candlelight, trembling as if it might extinguish at any moment. Early EBM beats hums in the undercurrent, issuing its threat obliquely through static and silence. Hofer’s voice, half-swallowed yet near, moves through the frost like breath crystallizing, intimate but distant, vulnerable yet unyielding.
Listen to “Haunting Me” below:
For nearly a decade, Hofer has traveled under the Viva Non name, charting a path that has shifted from synthpop’s nostalgic shimmer to something more restrained, more deliberate. “Haunting Me” extends that evolution, its layers building toward a kind of suspended release. That tension seeps into the structure of the track itself, where openness and reserve press against one another. The bassline drives forward, a metallic heart beating steadily beneath a surface of air and reverb. Each element is given space to breathe, yet nothing fully settles. It is the kind of song that inhabits a threshold between intimacy and distance, solitude and communion, silence and speech.
“I’ve had this track mostly finished for a long time but it never felt quite right to actually go ahead and release it,” he explains. “After getting a new synth and adding a more ‘techno’ informed bass-line to it, the track got there for me. I’m excited to finally get this one out. The lyrics speak to the tension felt about letting people in. It’s good to be selective about such things but not too much so.”
In that poise, Viva Non locates a rare stillness: music that arrives like an icy pulse in the night, felt even as it fades.
Follow Viva Non:
Or via: