The year turns its face away slowly, like a worker rinsing his hands at the end of a shift, water running dark with what the hours required. What remains is a held breath, a pause thick with endurance. Into that interval arrives this double single from Palindrones: two pieces that feel like lived-in statements rather than shared conditions. They speak from inside the long night many have known, yet they carry a warmth earned through contact, and through staying. Even the optimism of the turn of the millennium is magically captured here – with perhaps a little more hard-earned wisdom.
Palindrones are a South London dark electronic duo formed in 2020 by Jamie and Karen, born out of lockdown separation and sustained through connection at a distance. Their work turns on duality (symmetry and contradiction as method and meaning), where light and night, softness and force, digital pulse and human touch meet without cancelling one another. That balance carries through their recordings and into the room when they play live, where sound and visuals converge with a sense of shared lift.
Abraxas draws from Gnostic tradition, where the term names a composite force: deity, amulet, and cosmic cipher, holding good and evil within a single form, its seven Greek letters summing to 365: the full turning of days and heavens beyond the material world. That totality courses through the track itself. Rhythms strike and recoil, jagged yet deliberate, while melody moves forward with an insistent innocence that never quite forgets what it has seen. Joy lifts the surface, but knowledge adds gravity. Pain returns in cycles, less as affliction than awareness. Sacred impulse brushes against raw appetite; ascent and descent occur simultaneously. It feels made for New Year’s Eve: a moment of reckoning and release, where everything carried forward meets the promise of beginning again.
The Brightling Star widens the frame. Where the first track wrestles, this one gathers, bringing to mind particularly Yacht’s The Afterlife with its chant. Voices rise with calm resolve, breath finding a common cadence, feet setting down together on uncertain ground. The progression feels communal, each layer arriving with quiet inevitability, until the music stands upright in shared purpose. Fear loosens as bodies move side by side; distance collapses when eyes meet across the dark. At its core lies a simple conviction: individuality and unity can share a single pulse. It carries hope and renewal forward, finding lift in alignment, where separate forces meet and briefly hold their balance.
The video for The Brightling Star extends this sense of communion into the physical world, assembled from live performances across the UK throughout 2025. It watches the song circulate in real time, passing between bodies, faces, and raised hands, capturing the exchange of exhilaration between the crowd and Palindrones themselves. The camera lingers on that shared momentum, where scale and closeness coexist, and the music becomes a form of worship to the cosmos itself. Produced by Palindrones, with footage contributed by Sean Mooney, Chris Anderson, and Rob Claw Fox, the result feels lived-in and generous, shaped by nights spent together rather than staged for distance.
Watch the video for “The Brightling Star” below:
Together, these songs feel attuned to a threshold moment. They recognize what has been endured without rehearsing it endlessly. They suggest that renewal is neither sudden nor solitary. It comes through alignment, through listening, through the modest courage of staying open. As the calendar turns, this music offers an extended hand. That is enough.
Listen to Abraxas and The Brightling Star below and order the singles here.
Regular fixtures across the UK circuit, Palindrones have appeared at festivals including Resistanz, Whitby Goth Weekend, and Cable Festival, and shared stages with A Flock of Seagulls, In Strict Confidence, Beborn Beton, and Deep Forest, building a following grounded in unity, momentum, and release.
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