There’s an endlessness to living,
in the certainty of time,
what had started now is ending,
what is ending is sublime
Madeline Goldstein returns with her latest release, Apogee, a dazzling burst of retrowave synthpop bliss and a potent new entry in her growing song catalog. Marking a charged debut on the discerning curation of new label Artoffact Records, the track serves as the second single from her eagerly awaited full-length album, slated for release this autumn. Surging with vibrant retro pulses, shimmering synth textures, and infectious disco-tinged new wave beats, Apogee vividly transports listeners back to the neon-hued, electric dreams that permeated early-to-mid-’80s pop culture. Goldstein’s trademark vocal prowess floats and soars effortlessly above the soundscape, delicately capturing that split-second tension hovering between closure and uncertainty—an anxious tremor where memories endlessly fracture and reshape themselves. Embracing a paradox of dread and exhilaration, the song translates existential ache into ecstatic movement, a dance-floor exorcism beneath the hypnotic glare of strobes, liberating sorrow into joyous surrender.
Apogee, as Goldstein explains, captures “that moment or shift, when you feel you’re at the edge or the end of something, and all the ways in which the narrative of ‘that thing’ can transform and mutate in your unreliable memory.” It confronts head-on the terror of the unknown, accepting helplessness not as defeat, but as catharsis…”a crying on the dance floor kind of thing.”
In writing Apogee, Goldstein collaborated closely with Matia Simovich, marking their inaugural co-writing effort. “This particular track is the first and only cowrite between Matia Simovich and myself thus far in our collaboration,” Goldstein reveals. “We built it from the ground up in the studio (and literally from the grounds surrounding the studio, dragging wrenches across chain link fences to create the percussive elements etc). Apogee was a true effort of everyone in the studio, but ultimately the most personal song on the record for me, in terms of the narrative.”
It’s this immediacy, this tactile ingenuity: chains rattled, fences scraped, that injects a rare physicality into the track. The result is urgent pop, textured with industrial honesty, poised and precise yet raw enough to bruise. Apogee fully embodies that liminal moment, embracing the beautiful collision of collapse and release.
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