I’m losing my mind
I can feel my soul being lost, trapped, stranded in time
Deep voices travel strangely through old houses. They pass beneath doors, collect in stairwells, and make an invitation from the drawing room sound like an excellent reason to leave. Sacramento’s In Retrograde furnish those rooms with choral textures, droning guitars, and rhythms that suggest somebody downstairs has started running. Their deathrock has a taste for aristocratic excess, with enough physical force to send the furniture skidding.
Based in Sacramento, California, and active since 2018, the BIPOC deathrock and post-punk band draws from gothic rock’s theatrical vocabulary and the severity of black metal. Their five-track Cold Read demo brings their current sound into focus through new material and fresh mixes of earlier songs. The demo arrived on Bandcamp on October 12, 2026, with a wider streaming release announced for Halloween. It also offers a route back to The Lovers, the 2023 two-track release containing crowd favorite Two Lovers.
Shattered Sun (2026 mix) opens the ballroom doors with a firm drumbeat, choral atmosphere, and a deathrock guitar drone. Baroque flourishes accumulate in the dense arrangement, while the voice descends toward Peter Steele’s deepest register before climbing into the emotional agitation of the Birthday Party’s Release the Bats and Mr. Clarinet, with something of Tuxedomoon’s No Tears in its heightened delivery. The song’s original published lyrics describe faith and identity disintegrating under divine abandonment, with eternal life becoming a sentence of repeated suffering. That grand vocal presence belongs to someone whose impressive residence has become a prison.
Boots seem to hit the ground running on Man Love. Rapid drums, ominous guitar tones, and bass that penetrates to the bone suggest a lantern-lit carriage racing through the night with demons in pursuit. The singer moves between a deep lower register and high notes, pressing against the packed arrangement. Its lyrics bring explicit desire into contact with crucifixion imagery, turning pleasure, authority, and punishment into an ugly struggle. Heard alongside that relentless rhythm, the encounter has a coercive menace that makes the imagined chase feel especially urgent.
Despite its title, Italian Disco (2026 mix) is far removed from Italo disco. A low guitar drone recalls Bauhaus’s Dark Entries, while string-like tones rise through the mix and the drums maintain a shuffling gait. The subterranean vocals approach Peter Steele’s cavernous delivery, lending the song the atmosphere of Dante’s descent into hell. The lyrics tie that sense of damnation to lost love: the singer recalls a summer separation, imagines an invitation to dance, and faces the prospect of eternity without the person they desire.
Effects give the opening strums of Italian Disco II a dark electrical buzz. Cymbals sizzle, drums boom, and atmospheric layers build around a steady forward rhythm. A low vocal growl moves through sustained drones and resonant, bowed-string-like tones, lending the proceedings an elegant romance. The arrangement keeps adding weight around the voice, with each new layer making the space feel more sumptuous and enclosed.
The demo closes with the title track Cold Read, which begins with ominous strumming and broad atmospheric textures. Its shuffling drums gather momentum over deep, propulsive bass, while the vocal smolders in a whispered growl. A rising and falling melodic figure leaves space between sustained stabs, giving the windswept mix a distinct shape. The lyrics return to the opener’s troubled relationship with time: the dead call, the mind threatens to give way, and the singer pleads for rescue from an existence experienced as confinement. Those separated notes sound like signals sent from somewhere difficult to reach.
Listen to the Cold Read demo below and order it here.
Released in April 2023, The Lovers offers an earlier glimpse of that appetite for romance and decay. Two Lovers begins with a high cello sound swaying through an atmosphere of gothic deterioration. A sudden yelp announces the band’s entrance into a much denser passage of bass and thick drumbeats. Here, the voice leans further toward Nick Cave’s Birthday Party performances, carrying a feverish Batcave abandon through the arrangement. The cello remains audible as the pressure increases, its melodic movement preserving the song’s elegance amid the commotion. The band’s description of it as a crowd favourite makes immediate sense.
Death Ablaze (2023 Mix) follows with hi-hat splashes and a deep bass groove that establish its rhythmic pull immediately. A wiry, melodic gothic rock guitar figure enters, followed by a voice pitched low enough to churn the marrow. The interplay between that guitar line and the vocal gives the song its particular pleasure: the melody holds its shape around the singer’s weight, each sharpening the effect of the other. It closes the pair with a concentrated dose of gothic rock’s physical appeal.
Listen to The Lovers below and order it here.
For a wider introduction, Transylvanian Recordings’ self-titled 2024 compilation gathers nine tracks from the band’s catalogue. Fans of Bauhaus, the Birthday Party, Tuxedomoon, and Type O Negative should find several inviting doors into this particular house.
Upcoming shows:
- November 29 — Owl Cave — Grass Valley, California
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