Couldn’t you tell,
I’ve broken apart,
I don’t know why you want my heart
Berlin, a restless crucible of decadence and reinvention, has found in Blake Harley one of its more intriguing modern troubadours. With her sophomore EP, BLAKE HARLEY, released this Halloween through Duchess Box Records, she offers three songs that glint like fragments of broken glass under strobe light: playful, melancholy, and meticulously constructed.
Harley’s sound exists in a tension between hedonism and heartache. It owes something to the synthetic minimalism of Neue Deutsche Welle and the romantic introspection of early British darkwave, but its attitude is entirely hers: rebellious, flirtatious, a little punk, and bruised by sincerity. If her 2024 debut happy tears was a confession whispered beneath club strobes, this follow-up feels like an assertion of identity.
The opener, Under Your Spell, begins with the bright pulse of a bassline that might have once soundtracked an adolescent summer. Yet Harley’s delivery is tinged with disbelief, as if she cannot quite accept the happiness she describes. Xylophone chimes punctuate the track like nervous laughter at a wake, their percussive cheer offsetting the undercurrent of doubt. The song’s video, filmed and edited by Browzan under Harley’s direction, mirrors this tonal duality: vivid and intimate, yet threaded with unease. The charming video shows her walking through various landscapes, as if confronting the very thing she wants.
Watch below:
Wasteland, the EP’s centrepiece, extends her gaze from the personal to the civic. It is an ode to Berlin, that ever-crumbling metropolis where despair and desire coexist in a perpetual embrace. Harley sings not as a detached observer, but as a participant in the city’s strange communion of ruin and rebirth. Majestic tom fills rumble like distant thunder, while reverb-soaked synths expand the track into something cinematic and strangely uplifting. Directed by Diego Caetano Guerra of Patroden Studio, its accompanying video captures Berlin’s raw geometry: the graffitied underpasses, the nocturnal fluorescence, the people dancing as if to keep oblivion at bay.
Watch below:
At just three songs, BLAKE HARLEY is compact but potent; a manifesto in miniature. It demonstrates how pop, in the right hands, can serve both pleasure and precision. Where others might trade in irony, Harley trades in truth, refracted through sequins and sweat. Beneath the shimmer lies a rare seriousness: the courage to dance while the world burns, and to mean every step.
Catch Blake Harley live:
- 8 November 2025 — Berlin — Cassiopeia Winergarten
- 9 December 2025 — Berlin — Cassiopeia (w/ Gwen Dolyn)
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