To wait for more, to vanish at sea.
Vanish into death on hands and knees.
It’s the floor that’s all that’s left to eat.
It that gnaws onto the soles of my feet.
Dutch band Bragolin know their way around a dance floor as if it were lit by candlelight, fireflies, and dread. On their latest full-length album, I Don’t Like What It Does to Me, Edwin van der Velde takes the familiar pleasures of darkwave and post-punk and draws them into something stranger and more enchanted, giving the record the air of a fable told at midnight and scored for the club. The hooks arrive fast, the atmosphere never loosens its grip, and the songs move with a furtive elegance, as melody and menace circle each other like figures glimpsed through smoke and ritual light.
The album’s opener, Not All Are Real comes tearing out of the gate with the kind of fear that makes your spine sit up straight. The premise is simple and nasty: something false has slipped among the living, and by the time anybody notices, it may already be too close. Bragolin drives that paranoia hard, with post-punk guitars that cut clean and cold while the rhythm section keeps the thing stalking forward. There is a grand sweep to it, too, especially with the string section entering the frame, and that added scale gives the song lift.
I Run and Hide pulls a sly move by stripping out guitars entirely and building the whole engine from layered Clavinets, a choice that gives the track a clipped, obsessive tension from the start. There is an 80s ballad mood tucked into its frame, bringing to mind Pink Turns Blue. The arrangement stays lean, all momentum and nerve, mirroring the lyric’s cycle of flight and avoidance as it circles tighter and tighter, until panic begins to feel less like an episode than a structure you live inside.
Elsewhere, the record opens its coat, revealing a few extra daggars. Feel This Flame Unfold, featuring Carrellee, is a lovely surprise, a duet that moves with grace and a little ache (saluting the older goths whose bodies may be less cooperative than they were twenty years ago), while the urge to disappear into lights and smoke remains gloriously intact.
Tar With Salt Foam, inspired by The Lighthouse, brings in the stink of sea air and shipwrecked nerves, with coldwave bass synth and Bass VI pushing against organ tones and field-recorded textures.
I Salute You Ancient Ocean brings Isolde Woudstra into the fold, her spoken word presence gliding over an 80s-inspired psychedelic dance track with an easy air of ceremony. Beneath it, a disco beat kicks up just enough heat to suggest a touch of Grace Jones and the blissed-out lift of Q-Feel’s Dancing In Heaven, giving the song a curious, ecstatic glow.
Then there is This Presence Like a Breeze, which may be the clearest statement of Bragolin’s particular magic. The song turns a woodland into a psychic trap, with some unseen terror making itself known through motion, breath, and pressure. In This Lightless Hall heads inward instead, toward burial, echo, and the peculiar solace of surrender, with subtle trip-hop elements giving the song a slow, sinking poise. By the title track, the album is staring straight into the rot at the center of the self and reporting back without flinching.
I Don’t Like What It Does to Me has movement, menace, and a wry sparkle in its eye. Bragolin sound fully locked in here, drawing from gothic dance music, horror film mood, and post-punk muscle without getting trapped by homage. This is a record for people who like their pleasure with a little poison in it, and Bragolin serve it up generously.
Play it loudly! Listen to I Don’t Like What It Does To Me below and order the album here.
