When the fields of the cross were burning
Our paths would go their separate ways
Somehow we were always learning
Learning from our own mistakes
DETOXi’s In Laughter carries the strange charge of unfinished business: a song born in the pandemic years, finally given its full second life. Southern California deathrock has always known how to turn damage into drama, but this track carries itself with a bruised grandeur that feels earned, shaped by absence, distance, and the weird ache of art left suspended when the world stopped mid-sentence.
Musically, the song feels cut from a generous, high-hearted lineage. There is the romantic sweep of The Cult, the broad reach of Midnight Oil, the open-road lift of Big Country, the hard tension of Killing Joke, and a flash of Aztec Camera’s bittersweet clarity in the way melody and feeling are allowed to meet head-on. Jennings sings straight into a memory with a killer anthemic chorus, while the band pushes forward with a handsome urgency, turning grief into motion and ultimately release.
Lyrically, In Laughter traces a relationship marked by fear, separation, and unresolved longing, returning again and again to the idea that love survives through joy rather than pain. Burning fields, graves, frozen time, and repeated invitations give the song the feeling of a letter written after the worst has already happened, when tenderness becomes the last brave act left.
Director Braedon Roller treats the performance video like a transmission from a band interrupted by history, then summoned back by the force of unfinished feeling.
“For this project, I wanted to borrow stylistically from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet,” says Roller. “I’ve always been struck by the candy-colored clown scene and thought that lighting and mood would be perfect inspiration for a music video. I also pulled from films like [Robert Eggers’] The VVitch and…Nosferatu: dark, desaturated imagery living in blue and orange tones. The song has this haunting beauty to it, and I wanted to capture that while really focusing on the emotion of the performance. One technique I like to use is having the singer perform in double time while overcranking the camera, then slowing the footage down in post so the performance lands perfectly on tempo. It creates this strange, hypnotic effect that felt right for this song. The video was filmed across two separate nights, over 4 years, and the edit was incredibly labor-intensive, but I’m really proud of how it turned out.”
Watch the video for In Laughter below:
The backstory of the band has the cruel timing of a rock-and-roll fable. DETOXi played the vinyl release show for their debut album, First Flesh, on Leap Year Day in 2020, only days before record stores and venues closed, putting the band’s momentum into a deep freeze. During the uncertainty that followed, they kept recording, releasing the In Laughter EP in March 2021 and beginning work on a video for the title track. Then life scattered the pieces: Derek Jennings relocated to Portland, Oscar Estrada and John Crerar started HEAD CUT, and Matt Barks turned his focus toward projects outside music.
Still, In Laughter kept moving. DJs found it. Fans passed it around. Social media did its strange little underground magic trick, carrying the song into new circles while longtime listeners kept asking when DETOXi might return to the stage.
Listen to In Laughter below and order the EP here.
And DETOXi return to the stage Friday, June 26, for their first show since the pandemic, celebrating Crerar’s 50th birthday at Vaquero y Mar in Ventura, California…the same venue where they last played before lockdown. The lineup brings together their earlier incarnation Maask, HEAD CUT, Guilty Strangers, and Dusk At Midnight. For DETOXi, the circle closes with feedback, friendship, and laughter carrying through the wreckage.
Get tickets to the show here.
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