Always running out of time
It’s our life
Coming to the end of the line
The story of another life
Wilmington, North Carolina’s Dead Cool return with Story of Another Life, a single that carries personal weight into the heart of their music. The track begins with a mechanized beat, steady and unyielding, as though someone has managed to lock time itself into a rhythm. Synths surge forward with insistence, glowing with a nocturnal charge, conjuring the atmosphere of a city that never really sleeps.
For Johnny Yeagher, the song emerged during a period when the ground shifted beneath him. His mother’s cancer diagnosis fractured the idea of permanence, leaving him to face the truth that days can change in an instant. That rupture informs the entire track. Every note, every turn of the arrangement, is touched by that revelation, that what feels eternal can dissolve without warning.
His vocal pulls the listener into that reckoning. There is no grand flourish, but a slow, deliberate ascent. The lyrics rise like wisps of smoke into still air, fragile yet insistent; hovering in the space between memory and the wish to hold back the hands of the clock. They’re less about surrender than recognition, acknowledging what cannot be stopped while still finding meaning in the attempt to pause it. The song’s tension between the mechanical drive of the beat and the ache of the voice creates its power. It’s a reminder that movement doesn’t cancel out grief. Instead, it becomes the way through. To dance is to hold on, to acknowledge that time is fleeting and yet insist on being alive within it.
The accompanying video, directed by Bradley Pearce, takes these ideas and places them in a more intimate frame. Johnny and Angie Yeagher are seen at a Boardwalk carnival at night, surrounded by neon lights and temporary pleasures. They eat cotton candy, watch a carousel spin, and walk toward the ocean where the tide presses against the sand. These are small gestures; moments of connection that steady us when the wider world feels unsteady.
Story of Another Life signals significant songwriting and video production growth for Dead Cool through its unflinching honesty. It’s a song that acknowledges fragility without collapsing under it, finding strength in rhythm, in memory, and in the simplest acts of love.
Watch the video for “Story of Another Life” below:
Dead Cool takes its name from a Chrome Cranks cut, a sly nod that hints at the duo’s taste for grit and glamour in equal measure. Johnny drives the songs with a mix of voice, synth, and guitar that shifts shape from track to track, while Angela anchors the pulse on bass and lifts the melodies with her harmonies. Together they strike a balance between urgency and atmosphere, somewhere in the wide terrain of darkwave, post-punk, and synthpop.
Since 2020, they’ve been building momentum the old-fashioned way: stage by stage, crowd by crowd. In the States, they’ve left their mark at Absolution Fest in Tampa and Dark Castle Fest in Louisville. Across the Atlantic, they’ve carried the same energy into nights at London’s Slimelight and Italy’s Midnight Club in Bergamo. Along the way, they’ve shared bills with Bootblacks, ACTORS, Astari Nite, Korine, Vision Video, and Xeno & Oaklander…bands that, like them, thrive in the after-hours where dance and drama meet.
Listen to Story of Another Life below and order the single here.
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