Your fantasy your forgery
You can turn it on
But its killing me
There was a certain 1980s horror logic that understood the television set not as furniture, but as a body in mutation: a bright rectangular mouth fed on VHS tape, spitting back instructions on who to trust, what to want, and how to dissolve yourself into the signal. Boston dystopian post-punk outfit PROLES tap into that same diseased voltage on “The Following,” a track that, to our ears, obliquely casts modern social media as less a tool than a cult ritual in modern dress, where the screen glows, the face shifts, and devotion is measured in performance.
The song’s lyrics – flashes of plastic worship, fabricated selves, borrowed fame, and the command to follow the followers – sketch a world where influence spreads like wildfire. In the band’s new video, that unease is driven home by the appearance of Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. of the Heaven’s Gate cult: one of the late twentieth century’s most chilling televangelists of annihilation, now folded into a fever-dream of surveillance, mimicry, and mass suggestion.
Written and performed by the band and recorded and mixed at Noise Collaborative Studios by J. Negro, “The Following” lurches out of the dark with buzzing analogue synths, a tight heartbeat click in the drums, and guitars that smear themselves across the mix like smoke against stone. The whole thing carries the reek of old-school deathrock and late-night VHS horror: sepulchral, theatrical, and slightly unclean, with reverb-laden vocals that drift between gothic incantation and menace. When the track locks into the lines about fantasy and forgery, it takes on the force of a chant, less a chorus than a congregation forming in real time. PROLES are clearly aiming at the falseness of self-display and the seductions of image culture here, but the song never turns into a lecture. It stalks, it seethes, it lets the sickness speak for itself.
Directed and edited by Nick Mehos, the video renders that theme in a blur of cult television, basement ritual, and glamorously degraded decay. Gretchen Shae appears in white lace at a small keyboard, doubled and ghosted against hanging fabric as if caught between séance and stage set. Elsewhere, the band’s performance footage is chopped into unstable transmissions and glowing CRT tableaux: basslines arrive in smeared close-up, faces split and mirror across the screen, and a red eye symbol burns like a warning signal in the static. Figures wearing oversized eye masks drift through dim interiors, hands reach toward television screens as if trying to cross over, and Applewhite’s face appears in degraded broadcast form, not simply as found footage, but as a terrible emblem of mediated persuasion. The whole thing feels part deathrock pageant, part public-access nightmare, part slasher-title-sequence hallucination.
Watch the video for “The Following” below, and order the track here.
PROLES are Gretchen Shae on vocals and synth, Jason O’Blivion on vocals and guitar, Daniel Denied on bass, and Nikki Severen on drums. The video stars the band, with additional camera work by Korri Lee and Jason Negro. As both song and visual statement, “The Following” lands as a sharp little dagger aimed at an era of self-manufacture, where every platform promises connection and every glowing surface asks for obedience.
Listen to “The Following” below, and order the single here.
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