looking glass, do you see,
a future filled up with you & me?
all around, fight the sound,
of a world that’s turned upside down
Julien Martinez – moonlit Texan wanderer turned Brooklyn night-owl – shows up with into black under his Kind Kid moniker like someone dragging a half-burned diary into the studio and daring the tape machine to blink. The song moves with a strange, steady glow, the sort that rises when two people hold each other too tightly while the world creaks at the seams. Martinez isn’t writing a love song so much as a temporary late-hour pact: two bodies wrapped together, bargaining with fate, whispering promises they know time probably won’t honour. They keep whispering anyway…that’s where the voltage lives.
A bright, bouncing beat gives the track its spine, the drums walking forward with a kind of stubborn optimism even while the lyrics sketch out a relationship fraying at the edges. Martinez answers himself in call-and-response lines that feel like an argument between hope and exhaustion. And then that guitar arrives, cutting through the haze with the clarity of a cracked bell, giving the song a lift it shouldn’t logically have. You can practically envision two silhouettes dancing in a living room lit only by the weak glow of a streetlamp, trying to pretend the dawn won’t bring the same doubts they’ve been dodging for months.
The production by Garret De Block gives everything a soft blur around the edges, while Trey Frye’s mastering keeps the punch intact. Kind Kid’s blend of post-punk, indie, and new wave shows up without leaning on any nostalgic gimmicks; instead it feels like Martinez is channeling whatever storm was in his chest the night he wrote it. There’s a quiet bravery to the way he lays the lyrics bare: pledges to stay, to soothe, to wait by the phone, to carry someone else’s loneliness on his back. These aren’t grand declarations; they’re small, trembling offerings made in the dark.
Listen to into black below and order the single here.
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