Where’s the joy in this all?
Where’s the light in the dark
My hands hide my tears, I feel so lost
This first day of Fall
There is something especially lonely about being miserable on a day for which everyone else has already chosen your mood. A birthday comes with instructions: answer the messages, accept the affection, make a wish. For Los Angeles post-punk duo DECEITS, The First Day of Fall opens up the awful distance between that public celebration and a private wish to disappear. The calendar, as ever, has failed to consult the person concerned.
Following our premiere of the single, the song returns with a video directed by Shutter Visual, whose credits include work with Twin Tribes and Blood Club. Its tightly framed performance brings the song’s distress into uncomfortable proximity, with vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Moreno and drummer Francisco Saenz caught inside a room that seems to grow smaller as the performance intensifies.
Moreno wrote the song on a despondent morning the day before his birthday. Faced with an occasion supposedly reserved for happiness, he found himself confronting the desire not to exist at all. That unhappy collision gives the lyrics their particular ache: another year becomes something to account for, while the prospect of celebration makes an already difficult feeling harder to explain. Autumn provides an apt setting for such thoughts, its gradual retreat from summer matching the impulse to withdraw from everyone wishing you well.
The arrangement gives those thoughts a restless physical form. A commanding bassline and forceful drums drive through the song, while reverberant guitars spread outward over gothic synthesizers. There is punk urgency in the rhythm section and a wounded romanticism in the melody, each pulling at the other. Moreno’s singing follows the same uneasy course, moving from a softer, intimate register into high, strained cries as the music gathers force. The spacious production leaves room around his voice without taking any pressure off it.
Shutter Visual builds the clip around that pressure. Blue-green light washes across the musicians, with hanging guitars, amplifiers, and the white grid beneath their feet giving the performance space a stark, enclosed character. Close-ups of picking hands and struck cymbals keep returning us to the effort involved in playing, while wider shots catch Moreno bending over his guitar and throwing his head back. Saenz’s drumming supplies a firm center as the camera moves between the two.
Elsewhere, Moreno faces the lens with dark makeup trailing beneath his eyes, his pale shirt and decorative collar giving way to black stage clothes in other shots. He grips the microphone, raises his hands to his face, and sings with an increasingly exposed intensity. Blurred movement, doubled faces, and fractured views interrupt the more straightforward performance footage, making his expressions difficult to hold in focus. The visual instability suits a song about feeling estranged from the very life everyone else is congratulating you on having.
Near the end, the camera settles on white roses and scattered petals across the gridded floor. Against the room’s severe geometry, the flowers look painfully vulnerable, their associations with affection and celebration left in disarray. It is a fitting image for the song’s birthday premise, and Shutter Visual lets the performance carry the desperation that drove Moreno to write it. The most affecting moments come when his gestures seem to outrun his composure, giving visible shape to what the lyrics struggle to contain.
Watch the video for The First Day of Fall below:
Since forming in Los Angeles in 2021, Moreno and Saenz have channeled their shared love of the Spanish-language music of their upbringing into a particularly expressive strain of post-punk. Its rhythms, romantic feeling, and emotional directness inform a sound that gives gothic reserve very little room to get comfortable. The First Day of Fall draws on that openness, bringing a difficult private experience into a form that other people can recognize and share.
The First Day of Fall is out now, with the demo version also included on the Bandcamp release. Listen below and order the single here.
DECEITS continue their Hurt As Much As Me Tour through the United States, followed by an appearance at BLOODFLOWERS — Japan Goth & Post Punk Festival in Tokyo and dates in New Zealand and Australia. Get tickets here.
US dates — 2026:
- September 24 — Omaha, NE — Slowdown*
- September 26 — Davenport, IA — Raccoon Motel*
- September 27 — Chicago, IL — Sleeping Village*
- September 28 — Hamtramck, MI — Small’s*
- September 30 — Somerville, MA — The Rockwell*
- October 1 — Troy, NY — No Fun*
- October 3 — Philadelphia, PA — The Grape Room*
- October 4 — Brooklyn, NY — The Wood Shop*
- October 5 — Washington, DC — Pearl Street Warehouse*
- October 6 — Durham, NC — Stanczyks*
- October 7 — Charlotte, NC — Snug Harbor*
- October 8 — Atlanta, GA — Purgatory at The Masquerade*
- October 10 — Fort Lauderdale, FL — Revolution Live†
- October 11 — Orlando, FL — Will’s Pub†
- October 28 — West Hollywood, CA — The Roxy
- November 12 — San Diego, CA — The Holding Company
- November 14 — Huntington Beach, CA — Darker Waves
* With Computer Kill
† With Haunt Me
Japan — 2026:
- November 21 — Tokyo, Japan — Shinjuku LOFT (BLOODFLOWERS — Japan Goth & Post Punk Festival)
New Zealand dates — 2026:
- November 27 — Auckland, New Zealand — Whammy Bar
- November 28 — Christchurch, New Zealand — Space Academy
- November 29 — Wellington, New Zealand — Valhalla
Australia dates — 2026:
- December 4 — Newtown, NSW, Australia — The Vanguard
- December 5 — Collingwood, VIC, Australia — The Tote
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