Once I felt against the world, I seen and found the dread of it all
Cold as ice until the fall
Picked up all my things
As I stand!
In Phoenix, Arizona, the heat seduces while it tests one’s resolve. From that furnace comes Meldamor, a duo bound by love and electricity, Mel and Dave Parley. Their collaboration is pure alchemy: a marriage of darkwave and post-punk, shaken with the ferocity of metal and the primal honesty of punk. The music hits with conviction, but also with unexpected tenderness, pulling you into its orbit the way desert air pulls mirages from sand.
Dave Parley, who cut his teeth with the cholo-goth pioneers Prayers, knows how to make rhythm a weapon. His synths rise like storm fronts, dense and hypnotic, while percussion lands with the certainty of knuckles on bone. Mel, meanwhile, delivers lyrics with a dual charge, both unguarded and unflinching. Her voice seems to shift form at will: at one moment it leans into vulnerability, the next it spits fire. At times, her phrasing recalls the emotional candor of Joni Mitchell or Laura Nyro, though set against a stark, modern synthpop frame.
Their latest track, True Sacrifice, speaks of endurance: the act of moving through despair into renewal, of holding grief and love in the same trembling hand. Here, the warrior meets the angel; the soft voice does not dilute the strength but magnifies it. In this sense, the song is a hymn for those caught between fragility and resolve, a reminder that strength is not the absence of pain but the decision to keep walking with it.
The accompanying video expands this mythology. Cast in icy blues, the band wields swords in a frostbitten world, their movements echoing the ritual of medieval combat. Mel appears less frontwoman than warrior-queen, her presence at once feral and regal. There’s fantasy here: whispers of Tolkien’s high myth, C.S. Lewis’s northern cold; but it is laced with psychedelia: prisms that refract reality into dreamlike haze, fractured light spilling across steel and snow.
Meldamor thrives on these collisions of bold surrealism. The listener is carried to a center where sorrow and celebration peacefully coexist. There’s bravery in that balance, in refusing to simplify. Instead, they press forward: through heat, through dread, through loss, toward something luminous. True Sacrifice’s message is to embrace extremes, and to walk the line between anguish and ecstasy with open eyes…contradictions are where we truly live.
Watch the video for “True Sacrifice” below:
Listen to True Sacrifice below:
Meldamor is currently on their True Sacrifice Tour, storming across North America through early November. The run includes a wave of Gothoween dates in Las Vegas, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles, before the tour charges through Texas with shows in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas. Wrapping up with a southern and northeastern stretch, the band plays New Orleans, Atlanta, Providence, and a final blowout in Brooklyn on November 2 at Gold Sounds.
Live dates:
- Friday, October 3 Portland, OR at Coffin Club (Immortalis Festival)
- Friday October 10 Las Vegas, NV at Swan Dive (Gothoween)
- Saturday October 11 Bakersfield, CA at The Nile (Gothoween)
- Sunday October 12 Los Angeles, CA at Don Quixote (Gothoween)
- Thursday October 23 Austin, TX at Elysium
- Friday October 24 San Antonio, TX at Paper Tiger
- Saturday October 25 Houston, TX at Black Magic Social Club
- Sunday October 26 Dallas, TX at Doublewide
- Tuesday October 28 New Orleans, LA at Santos Bar
- Friday October 31 Atlanta, GA at Lunchbox
- Saturday November 1 Providence, RI at The Parlour
- Sunday November 2 Brooklyn, NY at Gold Sounds
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