Some days are full, and you’re let down and lonely
A speck light, is breakin’ in
A new death, a new rise, a new dread, it’s all the same
A sent from the gutter with clear blue eyes
In Copenhagen, heartbreak becomes a form of architecture. On As It Reels, Catcase builds cathedrals out of absence, each song a room where desire and regret circle like moths. The six-piece doom-pop collective, once the private sketchbook of Lasse B. Beck, now hums with the pulse of a full-blooded band exorcising quiet ruin through melody.
Beck wrote these songs in the strange, airless days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2024. “It’s not an album that seeks to provide answers,” he says. “It is more of a mirror, reflecting the listener’s darkest moments and most hidden victories.” That mirror glows with distortion. The guitars shimmer with jangle that recalls The Go-Betweens and The Pastels, while the bass throbs in the lineage of Bleary Eyed and Strange Ranger. Synths sigh with the kind of grandeur once worshipped by Spiritualized, and Beck’s voice quivers through the ache like Molina after too many cigarettes.
The band channels the ghosts of alternative pop’s golden decades: the clean ache of sophisti-pop, the Motorik pulse of post-punk, the glittering sadness of early alt-dance…and fuses them into something immediate and lived-in. These aren’t references; more like hauntings: hints of The Church’s narcotic glow, Smashing Pumpkins’ wounded beauty, the cinematic melancholy of Nyxy Nyx, the doomed romanticism of The Tubs.
Technicolored Eyes, the first single from the album, opens like dawn breaking over hangovered streets. “The track draws inspiration from The Church’s Priest = Aura era, the Japanese horror-game composer Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill in particular), Underworld, and a good measure of Smashing Pumpkins,” Beck explains. You can hear that insomnia in the bones of it: the bass moves like a heartbeat under glass; guitars smear the horizon; strings shimmer like a light you can’t quite reach.
The lyrics move through ruin, grace, and reawakening. The central figure burns, rebuilds, then rises “golden,” unbroken, untamed.
Beck recalls “walking home as the sun rises, overwhelmed, filled with this night’s experiences… in a stream of consciousness, where the night’s ordeals feel like a humming mass of impressions.” The track captures that dissolving moment — when last night still clings to your clothes but daylight is already accusing you of memory. “This once uplifting, driving wave of memories and self-understanding seeps away, becoming darker, more self-conscious.”
Listen to Technicolored Eyes below and pre-order As It Reels here.
Recorded with producer Kristian Alexander at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, As It Reels sounds like the private journal of a music obsessive who’s been underlining the same lyric for years.
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