What you said of patience
Burned into my brain
Leave your body bare and muddied
I love you all the same
Sometimes it’s only a brief brush of a hand, the kind of passing contact that sends a quiet shiver through the body before the mind can name the reason. The skin reacts first, the soul a breath behind, both registering a shift that feels small yet strangely consequential—and with Death Bells’ latest single, Shiver, that subtle jolt becomes the song’s guiding pulse.
Recorded in 2024 under the steady hands of Griffin James and mixed by James Trevascus, the track finds the Australian-born, Los Angeles-based duo sharpening their focus. Seasoned musicians Remy Veselis and William Canning are masters of tension, stretching a moment until it quivers, and here they press closer to the flame, letting devotion smudge the edges of reason.
Shiver leans into the tremor of surrender, mapping how loyalty can press against the body with equal parts solace and strain. Each line offers breath, water, fault, and fate in turn, tightening the frame as connection gathers force. The instrumentation deepens that pull: guitars reminiscent of The Cure and Killing Joke tunnel through the hushed volatility, anchored by a bassline that recalls early coldwave and post-punk, folded into an arrangement that leans toward mid-’80s alt-rock anthems tempered by the blurred lift of early shoegaze— crashing and rising with a near-ceremonial weight. Canning’s voice, brushed with distortion, moves like breath against cold glass: close enough to fog the surface, charged enough to leave a mark. The whole track hums with that namesake shiver—a physical reminder of how connection can jolt the body before the mind has time to speak.
Director Jeremy Stith shapes the accompanying video as a fractured transmission from some half-remembered place. VHS grit, analogue drag, and spectral fragments collide, building a kind of unstable shrine to the song’s themes. Faces blur. Bodies loom and dissolve. The footage behaves like memory under strain—recognizable one second, disobedient the next. Stith allows the imperfections to do the heavy lifting: warped tape, streaked frames, and a low hum of disruption that suggests both intimacy and distance. The setting feels suspended outside chronology. The effect is quietly hypnotic, a reminder that love often appears as a form of distortion—something that rearranges perception while heightening sensation.
Watch the video for Shiver below:
Shiver stands as another step in Death Bells’ continued evolution, a piece that threads devotion through distortion and lets the resulting tension bloom. Stith’s video meets the song at its most fragile point, holding space for touch, tremor, and transformation—those rare moments when surrender becomes a kind of clarity, and a connection reshapes the room around it.
Listen to Shiver below and order the single here.
To celebrate the release of their new single, Death Bells will be throwing a single launch show at Oblivion in Los Angeles on Friday, December 5th.
Tickets are here.
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