The new single S + M from Staytus has the crackling charge of a bad idea unraveling like a ball of blood red yarn. Sam Grundemann, the Los Angeles artist behind Staytus, has built the project around industrial pressure, electronic gloss, horror-film glamour, and the private emotional mess that keeps people returning to situations they swore they had outgrown. With her new single and video, released following her signing to Cleopatra Records, she turns separation, obsession, and the pull of reconciliation into something sleek, strange, and seriously messed up.
The track moves through industrial, electronic, and nu-metal influences with a sleek sense of threat, all pressure points and polished unease. Working with producers Sean Beavan, whose resume includes Nine Inch Nails and 8mm, and Matt McJunkins of A Perfect Circle and Puscifer, Staytus lets S + M breathe inside a space built from serrated textures, heavy electronics, and vocals that shift between control and surrender. There is weight in the programming, but also a strange glamour to the way the song carries itself, like it knows obsession often looks better from a distance. Lyrically, “S + M” circles the afterlife of attachment: how someone can remain lodged in your identity even after distance has supposedly done its job. Desire becomes less a simple want than a feedback loop, intimate and magnetic, with every return carrying the faint humiliation of knowing better and reaching anyway.
Directed by Vicente Cordero of Industrialism Films, the video initially shows how seduction gets more interesting when something feels slightly off. The clip begins in a place of closeness, teasing erotic tension and emotional dependency, then gradually tilts into psychological distortion. By the ending, the relationship at the center of the video has been rearranged in the viewer’s mind, less romance than a private fantasy gone rancid. A bold choice in these times.
Staytus frames that narrative shift with precision: “I’ve always been inspired by films and visual storytelling that leave people unsettled in a beautiful way,” she says. “S + M starts off feeling seductive and emotionally intimate, but as the story unfolds, it becomes something much darker and more psychologically distorted. I wanted the ending to completely reframe the emotional experience of the song.”
Watch the music video for Staytys’ “S + M” here:
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