Phantoma
Secrets waiting for you
Painted by moonlit snow
Shake away all the tears that we have shown
Happy eclipse season! On the weekend of the Autumn Equinox, North Carolina’s Feyleux unveils their video for “Phantoma,” a track drawn from their latest album“Midnight Hearts.” The choice of date: a hinge of seasons, daylight poised against darkness, feels deliberate. In their music, as in their imagery, the duo negotiates thresholds, turning pop structure into ritual, and mood into theatre.
Laurie Ruroden and Erica Gilstrap form the nucleus of Feyleux. Their alliance is recent, but the chemistry arrives charged and taut. What they produce is not merely a revival of darkwave or dream pop tropes; it is a distillation. A tremor of bass synth drives the frame, guitars trace arcs that feel like afterimages on film stock, and voices are layered until they become vapor…suggestive of presence, but untethered from flesh.
Phantoma, released by Swiss Dark Nights, is preoccupied with apocalypse and desire. The song sketches intimacy against collapse, the erotic pitched against ruin. There is refracted grandeur, reframed through restraint. One hears the vocabulary of 1980s goth and ethereal pop: icy leads, programmed percussion, harmonies that stretch upward, yet Feyleux handles these materials with precision, sanding away pastiche into a direct line to the listener’s nervous system.
The video for Phantoma translates this ethos into image. Shot with handheld immediacy and layered edits, it recalls the collage aesthetics of late-80s and early-90s alternative music television, where grain and blur suggested an oneiric suspension. Figures half-seen, gestures repeated, light that dazzles only to dim again. It is feverish, yet disciplined; an assemblage where the boundary between nostalgia and invention collapses.
The song itself brims with unease: synth lines coil like serpents, guitars shimmer in vertical sheets, and vocals hover with a paradoxical clarity. The effect is sirenic—neither comfort nor terror, but a simultaneous pull toward both. Listeners are invited to inhabit a zone where the familiar pop refrain becomes estranged, uncanny. To invoke comparisons to Cocteau Twins, Lycia, and Cranes is natural, but perhaps insufficient. Feyleux feel like heirs to the late-80s and early-90s ethereal goth lineage, a tradition scented with incense and draped in velvet, where earnest magickal spells were whispered into microphones and echoed across cavernous spaces. Their music rises like baroque architecture in miniature: ornate yet imposing, every detail serving atmosphere as much as structure. In this way, Feyleux situates themselves within lineage while resisting confinement, building devotion and dread, intimacy and annihilation into their aural cathedrals.
On the cusp of seasons, they offer a sound that feels equally like eclipse and dawn.
Watch the Video for “Phantoma” below:
Feyleux’s Midnight Hearts is out now. Order Here
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