We rested in a house built out of glass
When the trouble came it shattered fast
The cold touch of monochromatic melancholy meets hypnotic storytelling on A New Way to Hurt — a four-track collaborative EP from London-based producer Metallic Lover and singer-songwriter Claudia Kane, released via her imprint Villainess Records. Mastered by Justin Drake and adorned with artwork by Metallic Lover himself, the record feels like the soundtrack to a lost 80s neo-noir — flickering neon, blurred mascara, and tension that lingers like smoke after the fire.
Emerging from London’s subterranean after-hours, the pair fuse Darkwave and EBM basslines, frosted synth pads, and 80s-indebted melodies into an emotionally volatile landscape where fragility and tension shimmer side by side. Kane’s voice — intimate yet spectral — is the warm pulse within Metallic Lover’s glacial framework, her phrasing both confessional and cinematic. The result is music that sounds as if it were mixed for a midnight screening — suspenseful, sensual, and sharply stylized.
The title track, “A New Way to Hurt,” sets the tone like a cracked mirror catching light. It opens with an icy pulse and staccato synths that flash like steel beneath glass. Danceable yet dangerous, it’s driven by a bassline that throbs beneath cascades of metallic percussion. Kane’s words dismantle shame and outdated rituals, seeking reinvention through emotional demolition. She imagines burning away the past to make space for a different kind of hope — one laced with deceit, desire, and rebirth. Her voice glides between strength and surrender, transforming confession into something ritualistic, as if pain itself could be repurposed into renewal.
The tension deepens with “The Wire,” where the tempo tightens and the walls close in. This slow, chrome-coated burn recalls Ultra and Black Celebration-era Depeche Mode, but sharpened with the industrial sensuality of early ’90s machine pop. Metallic Lover threads precision basslines through cold, percussive strikes that echo like warning bells. Lyrically, Kane traces the threshold between longing and dependence — that precarious moment when connection morphs into confinement. The titular “wire” becomes both tether and trap, feeding the paradox of desire: the closer you hold it, the more it cuts. It’s a song that captures intimacy at its most dangerous — electric, intoxicating, and inescapably human.
The pulse softens and expands on “Wings,” the EP’s emotional apex. Opening with a crisp snare and shimmering synth riff, it unfolds like a noir montage — streetlights flashing across rain-slicked streets. The production swells into a cinematic crescendo of chain-like percussion and ethereal pads. Kane reflects on the illusion of control, realizing that love cannot thrive in captivity. Through the image of tethered wings and unreachable skies, she evokes the ache of letting go, where affection means release rather than possession. Her delivery is tender yet resolute, mirroring the bittersweet truth that freedom and love often coexist uneasily. It’s heartbreak as elegy and liberation alike — a ballad that glows like a cigarette ember in the dark.
Closing the record, “Cross Her Heart” arrives like the final scene of a thriller — all tension and echo. Ominous synth tones and door-like percussive thuds set a suspenseful pace as Kane circles the themes of faith and betrayal. She frames the breaking of trust as a ritual act, invoking vows that cut as deep as they console. Her delivery carries both menace and mourning, blurring the boundary between devotion and revenge. The production leans into its cinematic menace — ghostly choruses and icy stabs of synth evoke the spirit of Goblin’s giallo scores. The result is a requiem for promises that hurt too much to keep, and too sacred to forget.
Across A New Way to Hurt, Metallic Lover and Claudia Kane construct a soundworld where vulnerability gleams like steel and melancholy moves with purpose. It’s body music for the disillusioned romantic: darkly sensual, elegantly restrained, and emotionally unflinching.
This is music for the ones still awake at 3 a.m., standing in the half-light between love and disappearance — where pain becomes poetry, and machinery hums like a broken heart still trying to beat.
Listen to the A New Way To Hurt EP below, and order here:
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