I know you’d never understand
The filth I love, the blood on my hands
Your prayers fall on deaf ears
Bounce off the walls, drown in my beers
There are nights when the walls feel too close, when the bathroom mirror looks less like glass than a witness, and every streetlight outside seems to cast judgment instead of comfort. That is the atmosphere Jersey City artist Rando LaFlare summons in the video for “Faded Curse,” a claustrophobic, late-night spiral of isolation, intoxication, and spiritual unrest. The single heralds his new album Nefarious, out now via E-Train Records, the label founded by New York hardcore luminary Danny Diablo.
Formerly the frontman of Jersey City darkwave/hardcore/screamo outfit Neon Funeral, Rando now pushes further into a sound that is wholly his own: half hip-hop, half post-punk and alternative, with ignorant trap songs colliding against bleak, guitar-driven confessionals. The split is deliberate. Nefarious is built around his versatility, his broad and unruly taste, and what he describes as a kind of musical ADHD that lets him make whatever feels true in the moment. The result is not genre tourism but emotional whiplash given form: bruised, belligerent, and deeply personal.
Produced by CLEARJAW, “Faded Curse” zeroes in on the album’s most cold-blooded instincts. It is a tight, icy, minor-key darkwave/post-punk song, with anguished guitar and vocals that breathe out like a sigh on a cold night. The guitar has a chilling quality that calls to mind This Mortal Coil’s “Sixteen Days / Gathering Dust,” threading a spectral ache through the song’s clenched rhythm and bruised atmosphere. Its lyrics are steeped in corrosion and spiritual exhaustion: prayers go unanswered, clarity never arrives, and whatever light is offered is met with suspicion or outright contempt. “You plead for light, I curse the spark / Forever rotting in the dark” is not just a hook, but a thesis statement. The song moves like someone pacing a room they have already destroyed, knowing exactly what they are doing and lacking either the strength or the desire to stop. When Rando breathes out lines like “I’m faded I know this is a curse / I swallow thorns to quench my thirst,” he turns self-sabotage into a daily ritual, one lubricated by beer, whiskey, and numb acceptance rather than melodrama.
The video, filmed by ShotByNJGoons, understands that mood completely. Washed in lurid pinks, reds, and cold nocturnal blues, it follows Rando through cramped domestic interiors and frozen city streets that feel equally unforgiving. Early on, he appears slumped on the floor beneath a hanging Death tarot tapestry, boxed in by white walls and red light, as if he has already been judged and is now simply waiting out the sentence. In the bathroom scenes, he drinks alone beside a sink with the water running, then later leans back against the tub under a shower curtain printed with a woman’s face, the image turning intimate space into something invasive and accusatory. The visuals make the lyrics physical: prayers do not ascend here, they ricochet, soak into plaster, and drown in spilled alcohol.
Outside, the clip trades neon claustrophobia for urban desolation. Rando stalks through snowy sidewalks and bleak alleyways fenced in by chain-link and steam, his body doubled and ghosted by disorienting effects that make him appear split from himself. The city around him feels half-abandoned, half-condemned, all sodium glow and dirty ice. A prayerful Virgin statue appears in one striking shot, introducing a moment of uneasy religious symbolism that sharpens the song’s central tension: the gap between redemption offered and redemption rejected. “Your prayers fall on deaf ears,” he says, and the video keeps returning to images that suggest absolution is nearby, visible even, but unreachable through the fog of self-loathing and intoxication.
That friction runs through Nefarious as a whole. Rando recorded, mixed, and engineered all of the vocals and songs on the album himself, giving the record a raw coherence across its stylistic swings. The album features only two guests: Chris Grau of Piss Mobb and Vincent, The Owl of PissOwl/Operate With Liquor, with additional production by CLEARJAW, No Lyrics, and Whitey Bulger. Even with collaborators in the fold, this remains a sharply personal statement from an artist fully committing to his own instincts, however chaotic or contradictory they may be.
There is a line in the song that lands with particular force: “Black heart, funeral drums / Whiskey veins and cigarette lungs.” It distills the whole thing into one image: a body still moving, still drinking, still speaking, but spiritually calcified. “Faded Curse” does not ask for sympathy, nor does it perform repentance. It simply documents the crawl through rot with unnerving clarity, making beauty out of bad habits, spiritual static, and the stubborn impulse to keep going even when the soul has gone numb.
Watch the video for “Faded Curse” below:
Nefarious is out now. Listen to the album here.
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