Photo by Jeremy Saffer
Athens, Georgia’s post-punk powerhouse, Vision Video, steps boldly into the fray with their third album, Modern Horror. An 11-track plunge into the grotesque and brutal realities of today’s world, the album doesn’t shy away from the visceral truths. Each song tears at the seams of a modern society plagued by atrocities, reflecting the raw underbelly of human experience.
Vision Video has conjured up something fierce with this banger of an album—sharp, relentless, and unflinching, holding a mirror to the horrors that creep through modern life. The band (Dusty Gannon, Emily Fredock, and Ryan Houchens) creates intense and uncompromising goth rock with a message. Injecting malaise into classic post-punk and new wave, this is refreshingly modern while paying homage to artists like the Chameleons, Killing Joke, The Cult, and The Cure.
Earlier releases like Stay and In My Side (Modern Horror Version) hinted at the fire within, but Dead Gods truly ignites the flaming heart of the album. A fierce critique, Dead Gods rips into those who twist ideology and dogma into instruments of oppression and violence. With a cutting edge, the song is a howl against authoritarianism, a battle cry for those suffocating under the weight of blind faith and tyranny.
Modern Horror plunges deeper and bites harder than Vision Video’s earlier work, drawing from frontman Dusty Gannon’s raw, personal experiences as an anti-war Afghanistan veteran and a former firefighter-paramedic. This album is a searing indictment of the systemic breakdowns in society, the relentless brutality, and the sense of hopelessness gnawing at the edges of our world. With each track, the record exposes the very real horrors many face daily, a blunt warning against the path of war and violence.
Gannon channels his own disillusionment, his frustration, and the scars left by war, shining a harsh light on how power, violence, and disenfranchisement intertwine. Each note, each lyric pulls no punches, stripping away pretense and sentimentality, leaving only the raw nerves of a world pushed to its breaking point. Modern Horror is acidic, and it burns with purpose.
“I’ve been through some really unimaginably awful experiences and they will live with me for the rest of my days,” says Gannon. “I went through a time in my life where I tried to compartmentalize those memories and push them into a place in my mind where I thought they would remain buried, but I found that to be futile and it always came back to the surface with more vigour and ill-affect. I now understand that we have to bring these awful things into the light, and examine them head-on, which is essentially the point of the entire album…Writing Modern Horror has been an outlet for my reflections and frustrations of the current state of America and the world at large. I see a lot of regression happening in the world, and it is so disheartening to me. Having been through a war personally, then being a paramedic-firefighter during the pandemic, I started to see these shifting and cracking fault-lines in the way that everything worked. I think we’re watching the failure of untenable systems, like unbridled capitalism, colonialism and religious fundamentalism. Instead of allowing them to die off, the powers-that-be are doubling down and it is causing a lot of unnecessary atrocities and hardship to occur.”
Dusty Gannon, a longtime fan of horror films, views them as a kind of twisted mirror reflecting societal issues, allowing for deeper analysis of human fears and flaws. With Modern Horror, he sought to create a similar reflection, using dark imagery and metaphor throughout the record. The title is also a clever nod to one of Gannon’s favorite songs, Modern Love by David Bowie. He draws a parallel between “horror” as an inversion of “love”—two forces deeply intertwined, yet opposed. Throughout the album, there are subtle lyrical nods to Bowie, showcasing Gannon’s admiration for the legendary artist while exploring darker, more unsettling themes.
“There’s an axiom of horror films that I think is relevant here: If you show the monster too much in a horror film, it becomes less scary,” he says. “The special effects makeup or the mask of the monster slips and shows the superficiality of it, and you understand that it has no actual power over you. I hope this record does that for people to these seemingly insurmountable problems like war and genocide. We can do something about these things, but it requires understanding and unflinching examination. We have to overcome the fear and challenge these things directly.”
On October 22, Modern Horror will be released on vinyl and everywhere digitally.
Stepping into new territory, Vision Video teamed up with renowned producer Ben Allen (Erasure, Animal Collective, Deerhunter) to shape this record’s distinct sound. Allen’s deft touch can be heard throughout, recorded and mixed at Maze Studios in Atlanta, with Frank Arkwright (The Smiths, New Order, Joy Division) mastering the final product at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. The album’s cover, a striking visual by Ryan Dunn, further underscores the boldness of this release.
In other news, Vision Video has earned the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards Editor’s Eyeball Award for 2024, and will join the lineup of the Sick New World Festival in Las Vegas.
The band will continue touring throughout the autumn and winter, crossing the pond to stop in Germany, the UK, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and The Netherlands. Do not miss them live!
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