If Lost & Burnt were a streetlight, it would be flickering in two languages at once: one side humming the blues in Dutch, the other whispering back in English, both voices ghosting over menacing basslines. It’s the kind of track you imagine bleeding out of a busted car stereo at 3:00 a.m., somewhere between a haunted record store and the ruinous aftermath of a party at an art collective’s loft.
Legends of the Seven Golden Vampires is not your usual Frankenstein’s monster, it’s the bolt through the neck of genre: a beautiful mess of wires and winks from the past, short-circuiting expectations. Nick Foster prowls on bass and guitar; Shakeel Esoof and Luke Barratt man the boards like mad scientists in the control room, making heat out of trip hop haze, electrostatic, and crumbling loops. Ilse Van Der Linden comes in as part torch singer, part transmission from the beyond. Her vocals stretch like vapor, bend like smoke, and land somewhere between Natalie Merchant and a séance gone sideways.
Broken breakbeats hiccup beneath synth shrieks that sound like laser fire in an old arcade. Then Van Der Linden cuts through the fog, her voice not so much front and center as stitched into the pulse, speaking in tongues and tremorus. She haunts the song, letting the instrumentation push forward in waves: trip hop in its bones, sure, but this is no Portishead rehash. There’s a splash of funk in the frame; a smidgen of jungle in the reverb.
This is genre demolition as sport. The band, named after the 1974 Hammer horror kung-fu freakout The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, is a four-headed phantom of influence. UK psychedelic rock, Northern Soul, disco, punk-funk, Detroit techno, and acid house all crash the party. But rather than sounding like a mashup museum, Lost & Burnt rips it all up, runs it backwards through a blender, and presses it to wax with a smirk.
The result is track as weird and wonderful as its lineage. While the band may come from a DIY ethos, there’s nothing slapdash about this. The song was mastered at Abbey Road Studios, and you can hear it in the muscle, every warped loop and fuzzed-out chord locked tight in its orbit.
Listen below:
Lost & Burnt is a flare shot through a thousand nights of basement shows, pirated mixtapes, and blood-red dance floors. For those who still believe that the ghosts of genres past can get up and dance again, this is your invitation.
Follow Legends of the Seven Golden Vampires:
Or via: