Here without you,
When I need you tonight…
Few bands inspire the kind of curious anticipation that greets every new release from Odonis Odonis. The Toronto outfit has long stood as one of the underground’s most unpredictable forces—restless experimenters who dissolve the borders between post-punk, industrial, shoegaze, and electronic body music. Each record feels less like a genre statement and more like a new room in an ever-expanding structure of sound—bold, kinetic, and fiercely alive.
In continuing with that tradition, Odonis Odonis shares the video for “Come Alive” from their forthcoming self-titled album, arriving November 15 via Royal Mountain Records.
“Come Alive,” the band explains, “is a trip-hop/shoegaze track inspired by personal experience, capturing the moment of awakening and embracing change. The song and its video follow a character breaking out of a simulated world into a living, dynamic environment. Drawing on the Metabolists and visionary architects from Yona Friedman to Archigram, it transforms the built environment into a space that feels alive, immersive, and full of possibility. Our built environment is alive in itself.”
The lyrics evoke the tension between desire and detachment—the fragile stillness before self-recognition. They move like breath between presence and absence, tracing a quiet metamorphosis, breaking free from dependency, surrendering to life’s current, and rediscovering renewal. “Come alive” becomes a mantra of release, urging transformation through acceptance, even when connection feels out of reach. The dualities—here with you, here without you—echo this awakening. They become a dialogue between form and emptiness, self and world, each dependent on the other for meaning. “Come alive” is no longer a plea but an instruction to awaken within solitude, to see that awareness itself is the connection we seek.
The track’s slow rhythm and atmospheric textures give the illusion of stillness, yet within that stillness, there is movement—a heartbeat learning to synchronize with everything around it. Odonis Odonis channels this realization into something lucid and luminous: a meditation on being, dissolution, and the small, radiant act of remembering that we are alive. The song’s string textures feel almost human in their warmth, like the pulse of breath made audible.
Shawn Chiki’s direction captures this awakening through image and motion. A red figure drifts through a Cubist city, its angular world built from strict geometry, each shape a boundary of thought and identity. It floats apart from its surroundings, aware yet isolated, a single note lost in an unmoving chord. Gradually, the landscape softens—the sharp lines dissolve into curves; squares bloom into fractal spirals. The figure’s world begins to move with it, as though thought and form are learning to breathe together. This transformation becomes an understanding: the self was never apart from the whole, and the environment itself is conscious.
Watch the video for “Come Alive” below:
The best way to understand Odonis Odonis’ eclectic journey is to see it as a continuum—each release a layer added to an evolving architecture of alternative music. From the feedback-soaked Hollandaze and the atmospheric Hard Boiled Soft Boiled to the rivet-studded Post Plague and No Pop, and the industrial surge of Spectrums, their catalog has mapped out the restless terrain between noise, melody, and motion. The new self-titled album doesn’t abandon that structure so much as reimagine it from within, stripping away excess until what remains feels both elemental and alive.
If Odonis Odonis’ earlier work was an exploration of rooms and chambers, this new album opens the doors to the wider world outside—a space where genres and generations collide in the open air. It recalls an era when alternative music branched outward instead of upward, when scenes overlapped and bled into each other. Post-punk met industrial on the same stage as shoegaze and darkwave; goth intertwined with psychedelia and EBM. It’s the unruly spirit of the early Lollapalooza years, when the idea of “alternative” wasn’t about allegiance but about collision—when you could see Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Jesus and Mary Chain under the same blazing sun.
That same restlessness defines the new self-titled album Odonis Odonis. After years spent refining the mechanical edge of their sound, founders Constantin Tzenos and Denholm Whale have chosen to reassert something raw and human at the core. “With industrial music, it’s like you can hit a button now and pop that shit out,” says Tzenos. “I feel the same way about a lot of pop music—anything heavily AutoTuned or locked into a distinct genre is going to be easily taken over by AI. So I just thought, I want to make something that’s original to us. We wanted to make an emotive record and relay how we were feeling about all these massive changes that have been happening—not just in our lives, but in general. Like, where the fuck is the world heading? How is that affecting us? And how can we express it in a way people can relate to what’s happening in their lives? If we can make an honest record and put as much of ourselves as we can into this thing, you can’t replace that with a machine.”
In that sense, Odonis Odonis is less a return than a renewal—a reminder that the vitality of underground music has always come from its intersections, its friction, its refusal to stay still. Like those early festivals where subcultures collided and new forms took shape under open skies, this album pulses with the same conviction: that authenticity isn’t about purity, but presence. It’s not nostalgia—it’s proof that the experiment never ended, and that alternative music still has room to come alive.
The band’s new self-titled album is out on November 14th via Royal Mountain Records. Listen to “Come Alive” below and pre-order Odonis Odonis here.
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