The air around you crackles and burns
With a power you can’t control
And it’s never enough for you
You take up all of the oxygen in the room
Haunted Telephone, the new single from Australia’s Moon Elevator, hisses, hums…and hangs up for good. A slow-cooked dirge of detachment, it rides waves of molten synths and glassy guitars, each phrase pressing like fingerprints on a fogged-up mirror. Gareth Sobey sings like he’s already halfway gone, his falsetto a floating farewell above Nigel Moyes’ patient percussion and Stephanie Davis’ subterranean synth bass. Produced by Rohan Sforcina at Head Gap, the track spirals through space with a weight that never quite lifts; somewhere between Radiohead’s resigned dread, HTRK’s heat-haze disaffection, and Slowdive’s oceanic ache.
Lyrically, it’s a closed circuit…a line that once burned with static now buried under silence. The speaker lays down the law: no more ghost calls, no more emotional trespass. It’s a breakup letter to a presence that won’t stop haunting, a final dial tone for the ultimate energy vampire. This isn’t mourning so much as maintenance; the moment when a therapist’s suggestions finally get through someone’s skull. A clean cut, a dead line, a door locked against echoes. Haunted Telephone is less about longing and more about limits: the peace that comes when you quit picking up.
Moon Elevator conjures a feverish vision for Haunted Telephone, wrapping its disconnection in rich colour and ritual. Directed by frontman Gareth Sobey with Melinda King, the video sways through surreal tableaux: ominous tarot card pulls, televisions muttering quiet doom as a phone dangles from the cord, faces frozen in knowing silence. A call is made, but no one answers. It simmers like a Lynchian séance: cryptic, coded, and crawling with static-soaked significance.
Watch the video for “Haunted Telephone” below:
Follow Moon Elevator:
Or via: