There’s a particular kind of demon that never claws from under the bed – it lives behind the eyes, pacing the skull, rattling every quiet moment like a rusted cage. You don’t outrun that kind of presence; you bargain with it, sing to it, sometimes even build a whole persona around it just to survive. For Los Angeles-based artist MANIKVAMP, that demon became both muse and mask – and on her final EP under that name, Dead & Buried, she finally drags it into the light.
A focus point of this closing chapter is “Quiet My Mind,” the second track on the EP and the first proper entry in a three-part video cycle. Musically, the song opens with brooding gothic rock bass strums that seem dredged up from a mausoleum PA, before propulsive drums break through like a pulse returning after a long blackout. The mood is part California deathrock — you could picture MANIKVAMP easily holding her own alongside 45 Grave or Cinema Strange — part London Batcave murk in the tradition of Alien Sex Fiend, and part early, grimy mid-’90s goth and dark alt rock, the kind that drifted through the Nothing Records universe between ’94 and ’96.
Here MANIKVAMP’s vocals lean hard into that era too: scorched, strange, and resolutely melodic, like a broadcast from a lost late-night alt channel when the videos got weirder and the eyeliner heavier. Whatever faint echoes of relationship turmoil once lingered in the earliest drafts have long since dissolved. Within the architecture of Dead & Buried, “Quiet My Mind” stops being about another person entirely — it becomes a confrontation with the self, a mind snarling back at its own static, a private battleground where escape feels both urgent and impossible.
On Dead & Buried, all of that history coils into a single, deliberate strike. The EP – composed and refined with her longtime friend Scotty from Wisconsin – plays like a ritual to bury the MANIKVAMP persona she built to survive. Nowhere is that more vivid than in the “Quiet My Mind” music video, filmed and edited by Gnarlos Wright.
Visually, it’s pure classic goth and deathrock with a mid-’90s sense of decay and creepiness. Extreme close-ups of bleached, otherworldly eyes stare through the lens like haunted contact-lens commercials from hell. Orange-red hair spills across the frame in oily streaks; teeth bare in a crooked smile; mascara trails down the face like old ink. In one sequence, MANIKVAMP writhes in front of a massive industrial fan haloed in sickly green light, as if strapped to the backline of some forgotten warehouse show.
Later, we’re in a red-walled bedroom, candles flickering against ornate bedposts and baroque headboard carvings, the whole scene looking like a lovechild of a Hollywood cemetery photoshoot and a cable-access horror show from 1995. Bodies twist, collapse, reach for release that never quite arrives. The camera lingers on her face pressed against the sheets, then on a glowing bulb cupped in her hands – a tiny, burning thought she can’t quite put down.
Inside that coffin of colour and texture is the real subject: a mind in limbo, trapped in its own private chamber, trying to plot an escape route from itself. What began as a song about a past relationship has become, in this context, a hymn to burnout and overstimulation – the mania of the stage, the online noise, the persona that began as protection and mutated into a cage.
Watch the video for “Quiet My Mind” below:
MANIKVAMP’s story starts long before the Dead & Buried EP, back in the fallout after high school when she’d all but abandoned music. Years of escapism, partying, and repeated rock bottoms left her untethered. The way back began with poems, then lyrics, then melodies that came “as a sudden, powerful outpouring,” and with them, a name.
“‘Manik’ is me owning the label of being called ‘crazy’ and unstable, which used to hurt me until I decided to reclaim it,” she explains. “‘Vamp’ comes from my lifelong love of vampires and all things witchy. So, MANIKVAMP was born from that fusion—owning my mental illness and wrapping it in a dark, powerful aesthetic.”
Her 2020 debut project Yesterdayz Mourning was essentially an exorcism on tape – raw therapy sessions over beats, grief, and trauma poured straight into the mic. From there, the sound refused to sit still: pop-punk, post-punk, EDM, darkwave, industrial, metal-trap, alt-rock, sometimes switching languages mid-set. She came up in the underground goth scene as a promoter first, stitching together DIY line-ups and community, before taking the stage herself. That network of producers and musicians pushed her deeper into the underground, sharpening what had begun as survival songs into a fully-fledged live persona.
In 2024, that grind was recognised when she took home Best Upcoming Underground Artist at the Underground Goth Awards – voted in by the very community she’d been helping to build. “It showed me that all the hard work and burnout from performing had paid off in a way that had nothing to do with streams or followers,” she says. “It was a powerful and healing acknowledgment.”
Across the EP, MANIKVAMP stages a funeral for the self she no longer wants to inhabit.
“It represents a funeral,” she says of Dead & Buried. “It’s the symbolic burial of the MANIKVAMP character and everything she stood for. It’s about me realizing I had outgrown that version of myself and needed to put it to rest to move forward.”
The four songs trace that realisation step by step:
“Silent Screams” sinks into isolation and overwhelm, the feeling of being swallowed by your own persona.
“Quiet My Mind” chases the impossible silence, trying to muffle the static of expectation and attention.
“My Mind Is Made Up” is the turning point, where the decision to step away crystallises. In its forthcoming video, a group of vampire hunters prepares for the kill – a stand-in for external pressures and the industry’s appetite for self-destructive characters.
“Dead & Buried” closes the ritual with a twist: she takes the stake meant for her and kills MANIKVAMP herself, intercut with real footage from her journey. In the end-credits vision of fairy nymphs and a cocoon, the burial becomes the seed of another life.
This is more than a rebrand; it’s self-annihilation as a form of harm reduction. “While it started as a way to own my mental illnesses, it eventually began to glorify them,” she admits. The new name – not yet revealed – will be the opposite of MANIKVAMP, representing the person who walked out of the crypt: more focused, in control, and aligned with her healing, while still carrying that raw emotional core into whatever comes next.
Dead & Buried dropped on October 21st, 2025, timed with a new moon – “the fade to black, the end of a cycle, and the potent beginning of a new one.” A lyric video for the opening track lights the first candle. “Quiet My Mind” follows as the first story-driven visual, released on October 31st, with “My Mind Is Made Up” arriving in November and the climactic “Dead & Buried” film due in December, sealing the coffin shut.
For now, though, all roads lead back to that one plea: quiet. Not silence from the outside world – there will always be more shows, more releases, more noise – but a moment where the chorus in your head stops screaming long enough to hear who you’ve become.
“No matter how out of control your life gets, you can always find your way back to yourself and reinvent yourself,” MANIKVAMP says. “Every ending comes with a new beginning. The song may end, but the story continues to write itself.”
The MANIKVAMP chapter is dead and buried. The person who survived it is very much alive – and already writing the next spell.
Listen to the Dead & Buried EP below:
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