Some bands brood better. Black Ferns, led by Seattle’s Zoran Macesic, seethe in slow motion, like a storm trapped in amber. Their latest single Modern Days, from the forthcoming album Di Lodus, feels like the report of a civilization disintegrating at the edges of its own reflection. The song drips with exhaustion and grace, each note collapsing into the next as if time itself were slightly off its hinges.
The track opens with a piano that sounds like something salvaged from a half-burned lounge. Over it, Macesic’s voice moves between confessional murmur and spectral invocation, threading themes of isolation, decay, and the eerie ritual of departure. There’s an emotional economy that recalls the clarity of economic despair more than romantic tragedy. It’s not indulgent gloom; it’s a measured audit of the spirit in late capitalism’s waiting room.
The production is sparse yet intentional. The arrangement’s industrial textures pulse beneath brittle synths, each chord weighed down by the machinery of repetition. There are traces of Love and Rockets’ metropolitan melancholy, the spectral beauty of Echo & The Bunnymen, and the narcotic glaze of The Dandy Warhols and Primal Scream, all absorbed into a sound that feels singularly uneasy and magnetic. It’s music for the inbox you’ll never clear, for the city you’ve lived in too long. Producer Lincoln Traveller gives the track a sense of cold clarity – every echo accounted for, every hum with a purpose.
Modern Days features a video directed by Macesic and filmed by talented videographer Sherri Jerome. The film stars Opal Peachy, veteran of Seattle’s avant-garde theatre troupes Nordo & Nebula, as a woman methodically packing her final belongings while a restless spirit inhabits the house. The haunting is psychological rather than gothic; it’s the phantom of attachment, of every object insisting on one last sentimental valuation before abandonment.
In an era of distraction, Black Ferns feel like a quiet alarm, one that rings somewhere deep inside the architecture of attention. Modern Days is a ledger entry for everything we lost while refreshing the feed.
Watch the video for “Modern Days” below:
Di Lodus promises an expansion of this uneasy equilibrium. The 11-track album navigates emotional turbulence through cold, synth-driven compositions anchored by jagged guitar work and ghostly vocal layers. It’s a collection that suggests a world teetering between collapse and creation, where every note is both an elegy and an experiment.
Listen to Modern Days below and order the single here.
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