French Dark Synth Duo Lovataraxx Debuts Ominous and Obscure Video for “Zerrissen”

French duo Lovataraxx came into being in 2013 while crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, the structure’s lacy pink and grey girders offering both a literal and emotional frame for what was to come: music as mood swing, music as confrontation. From that steel-boned crossing came a project forged in contradiction – precise yet unpolished, dystopian yet strangely tender.

The Lyon band’s second LP, Sophomore, released in April 2024 via Germany’s Cold Transmission Music, spins like a severed transmission between decades. Their latest single, Zerrisen (German for turmoil), is rooted in minimal wave, dark electronics and post-punk pulse, it draws from Greek myth, Philip K. Dick’s collapsing realities, and the barbed excess of romantic poetry. Think synths straight from John Carpenter’s cutting room, drum machines that bite, and a bassline swimming in chorus-soaked despair.

Directed by Tanguy Guézo, the video for Zerrisen moves like a fever dream caught on grainy tape. A veiled figure darts through a tunnel, fists flying in a shadow-boxing blur, locked in combat with an equally obscured double. Intercut are scenes of the band’s frontwoman, braided and bristling, delivering her lines with a glint of defiance. The edit slices between flight and fight, anonymity and assertion. Guézo steers clear of clear-cut symbolism, choosing instead to lean into mystery with movement. The result is kinetic and cryptic, a bruised ballet of doubles and doppelgängers. The visuals echo the music’s disjointed urgency, tracing lines of tension between performer and persona, attacker and attacked. Like the song itself, the clip raises more questions than it answers, embracing a feverish unease that’s less about interpretation than instinct. It bristles, it bites, it runs…toward what, it never quite says.

Watch the video for “Zerrissen” below:

The bones of Sophomore, Lovataraxx’s latest dispatch from the edge, were first molded in the attic of the band’s own making before being sculpted further at Tropicalax Studio, another attic nestled in Saint-Étienne. It presses uncomfortable questions against the glass: What future are we really handing over? What dialogue exists between today’s world, and the “new cells” expected to build tomorrow? As prophetic speech grows dull, drowned in the slurry of technocratic jargon, Lovataraxx responds with tension, discord, and insistence.

Live, it’s a controlled detonation: a formidable frontwoman in boxer’s braids, switching tongues, spitting lines in English and German, while analogue TVs blink loop glitchy visions in the corner.

Revisiting themes from their earlier LP Hébéphrénie, Lovataraxx argue this youth is far from apathetic. Drawing on synthwave, sci-fi scores, and 80s horror, Sophomore is a tense, theatrical, and strangely enchanting record—a strange fairytale whispered through clenched teeth, insisting that collapse still carries the possibility of reinvention.

Listen to Zerrissen below and order Sophomore, out now via Cold Transmission Records, here.

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