Canadian duo Ghost Twin bursts forth dark synthpop. Their roaring synth lines, dirty pulsing bass, dreamy guitar, and a haunting vocal dichotomy lies in a liminal space somewhere at the crossroads of Baroque and Industrial. With the retro-flavoured video for Blue Sunshine, Ghost Twin utilizes live video percussion that feeds cinema through a cut-up technique, imbued with occult aesthetics.
“While this track was written pre-pandemic, and reflected our feelings about how world events were progressing, it feels especially timely right now,” muses vocalist Karen Asmundson. “Blue Sunshine is a love song for the planet Earth from the point of view of the human race as its repentant abuser. It’s a nihilist pop anthem for a world on fire. The perspective of the lyrics is essentially, “well we’ve destroyed everything to the point of no return, I guess let’s just try to make the best of our current reality instead of wallowing in regret.” It feels on the surface like an upbeat and cheerful song, but it is actually one of the darkest songs we’ve ever written.”
The pair randomly went to a 35mm screening of Warriors of the Wasteland at the Alamo Drafthouse when visiting New York in 2019, opening their eyes to an entire sub-genre of films, dubbed ‘Maxploitation’, produced in Italy that rode on the success of Mad Max.
“Most of these films never saw the light of day beyond their initial VHS release, so I kind of got obsessed with tracking them all down for some reason – or any film that takes place in some kind of post-apocalypse wasteland,” says Jaimz Asmundson. “We make live visuals for all of our tracks, and so when we wrote this song it seemed obvious that I needed to go deep into my Maxploitation well to source some clips. This video is made up of our live visuals and fed through our video synth that our friend Hex Inverter made, which gives it the look like it’s been sitting in a landfill for 100 years and was just discovered by a post-dystopic society in the future.”
It’s an eerie descent into the downward spiral. Watch Blue Sunshine below:
Blue Sunshine is off their album Love Songs for End Times via Artoffact Records on June 4th. You can pre-order the album from their Bandcamp.
Blue Sunshine is also streaming here:
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