In a crumbling pocket of Reading, Pennsylvania, where the ghosts of industrial pride dance in the shadows of derelict warehouses, Faux Fear emerges, breathing life into the desolation. There’s a grim poetry in the city’s decay—where every graffiti-scrawled wall and rusted factory whispers tales of lost dreams and faded glories, stories etched into the grime and grit. It’s a city where neglect and nostalgia entwine, and from this dance of death and renewal, Faux Fear has forged their sonic identity.
Their latest release, Lost Fates, a centerpiece of their new collection of songs, The Trends of Youth, unravels this melancholic tapestry with a sound steeped in the echoes of post-punk and darkwave pioneers. Through relentless, metallic synth lines and jangly, jagged guitars, Audrey’s haunting vocals cut through like a blade glinting in the gloom, invoking shades of Eurythmics’ synth-drenched drama, the unyielding energy of The March Violets, and the spectral beauty of Skeletal Family, with the ethereal whisper of Cocteau Twins ever-present.
Lost Fates meditates on what might have been—the roads untaken, the lives unlived, the ghostly specters of our alternate selves lingering in the mist of our choices. Faux Fear draws inspiration from Lisa Tuttle’s 1992 novel Lost Futures, where a dystopian world grapples with genetic manipulation and ethical decay, echoing their themes of fractured identities and existential unrest.
“The song is all about the small and large choices that have led to the lives we are each living, and confronting all the versions of yourself that you might have been,” the band explains. It’s a rumination on love, loss, and the fates left behind—an invocation of the paths that are never truly closed, only unseen.
To accompany the track, the band has conjured a music video that bends reality into a vivid, hallucinogenic narrative. Audrey transforms into a sequence of shifting personas: a dominatrix cloaked in mystery, a swaggering femme Elvis, a liberated flapper, and a sharp-edged Mod siren. Each guise vibrates with its own strange allure, together sketching out the enigmatic landscape that Faux Fear occupies. Their friend John, who did the keying for the video, says the concept materialized spontaneously—an organic outgrowth of their collaborative spirit.
Watch Lost Fates below:
Faux Fear’s origin story reads like a fable from the pandemic era—a time when physical distance gave birth to new creative intimacies. Audrey, wielding her drum programming and spectral voice, and Nicholas, with his guitar’s dark shimmer, began carving out a niche in the heart of Reading’s rough streets. With the addition of Pra on bass, their trio took shape, channeling the raw energy of DIY home recordings into something potent and fiercely alive.
Unlike so many contemporary acts lost in the sheen of overproduction, Faux Fear’s work is raw and tactile. The Trends of Youth thrums with an immediacy, the pulse of the drum machine beating with a strangely human warmth, each note vibrating with the weight of shared vulnerability and fervor. This isn’t music for the polished masses; it’s for those who find beauty in the rough-hewn, the unrefined, the honest.
Listen to Lost Fates below and purchase The Trends of Youth on cassette and vinyl here.
Catch Faux Fear on tour this autumn:
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