There is no escape from what’s coming our way
No longer just lunatics preaching and warning
Of the doomsday that we know is coming
Might as well let burn this asylum
Decline and Fall is where the wires now hum for Armando Teixeira, a man who’s marched through Portugal’s musical underbelly for decades. From the skeletal mechanics of Ik Mux’s EBM to the industrial clang of Bizarra Locomotiva, from the sampled swagger of Da Weasel to the brooding elegance of Balla, Teixeira has long treated genre like clay: something to bend, break, and remake. His soundtrack work, which has won him three Sophia Awards, drips through screens across Portuguese film and television like ink in water.
With Decline and Fall, the current current surges toward post-punk and darkwave, yet sidesteps all straight lines. Hugo Santos—veteran of Process of Guilt—brings a battering sense of rhythm, repetition as ritual, sound as strain and release. Ricardo S. Amorim, author and archivist of Moonspell’s mythology, lends language to the feeling—phrases sharpened on stone, precise and weighty. Together, they build something spare, strange, and staggeringly alive.
As All Ends, the first video from their upcoming album Scars and Ashes, is built from a strange and beating heart that thrums beneath the circuitry. It’s electronic, yes, but it breathes, it bruises. There’s a heaviness here, a sense of breath caught between clenched teeth, of time pressing its weight on brittle shoulders. The lyrics speak in smoke and settle like ash: a slow surrender to the truth that we lit the fire ourselves. Ecological ruin, moral decay, the choking dread of what comes next: all met with stillness. The world tilts, and we tilt with it. Hope doesn’t vanish, it dries up. And in its place, mud, silence, and the bitter comfort of knowing that if the end is near, at least it’s ours.
With a solemn bow to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and the bleached desolation of Anton Corbijn’s lens, José de Pina’s video for Decline and Fall drifts like a dirge through the bones of a poisoned world. It begins with machines: synths murmuring in sterile rooms, a rotary phone…and then the band slips past the refinery gates, into ash-choked air and along the banks of a lifeless creek. Ruin hangs heavy, both in the sky and underfoot. What’s left are scraps. Walls scratched with graffiti, a history scribbled in haste, a monument to fear and the fragile machinery of denial. They wander through the wreckage not with wonder, but with worn-out knowing, eyes scanning the wreck as if searching for a last word. And then, the sea…gray, indifferent. Death doesn’t strike; it waits. The end isn’t an explosion, but an echo. And there, on the sand, they listen.
Watch the video for “As All Ends” below:
Scars and Ashes, the debut album from Decline and Fall, expands upon the groundwork laid in their earlier EPs, Gloom and Pulse, but deepens it with a broader, more intricate musical language. These nine songs move through the bleak terrain of a world that feels increasingly fractured; capturing the weight of dystopian days while turning inward, toward the quiet devastations we impose upon ourselves: loneliness, isolation, the slow erosion of connection. Yet within the album’s pitch-dark textures, there flickers a faint but persistent spark…a hesitant hope that even from ruin, something gentler might rise.
Scars and Ashes is out on April 4, 2025. Pre-Order here.
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