Mazarine Pays Homage to Classic Horror in the Video for Their Shoegaze Lament “White Knight”

Words that rot, infect and spread

Rolling around inside my head

All these diamonds in disguise

White Knight I’m paralyzed

Los Angeles alt-rock duo Mazarine, made up of Derrick Perry and Angie Kang, unleashed their Giallo-inspired music video for White Knight, a fresh release that brims with raw emotion. Formed in early 2024, Mazarine took shape through a long-distance collaboration, blending shoegaze, dream pop, trip-hop, grunge, post-punk, and no-wave influences into a sound rich with nostalgia.

White Knight brings the grit of ‘90s grunge rock to the forefront, driven by Derrick Perry’s unfiltered guitar riffs. Angie Kang’s vocals, fierce and vulnerable, channel her own encounters with a toxic, narcissistic relationship, infusing the lyrics with a cutting honesty. The song conjures the spirit of ‘90s dark teen classics like The Craft, Nowhere, and The Doom Generation, lacing its gritty essence with dreamy shoegaze and pop undertones. Mazarine leans into darker territory with this track, evoking echoes of Cocteau Twins, Lsuh Slowdive, Massive Attack, Smashing Pumpkins, and Tuxedomoon.

White Knight captures the hollow ache of fleeting connection, where words fall empty and memories echo without meaning. The lyrics pulse with a longing bound up in emotional numbness, as the narrator contends with hollow promises and shallow exchanges, searching for a sincerity that slips through their grasp. Underneath the playful facade lies a deeper, unspoken struggle with detachment, a desire for substance in a relationship marked by transience.

The music video, self-directed and produced, draws from the unsettling beauty of classic horror—Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters. Set against surreal red and green lighting, the video conjures a fantasy world, a performance that blurs into dreamlike sequences, hinting at Lynchian undertones, as if the band has taken up residence in Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse.

The video captures that hollow ache that lingers in fleeting relationships, where each promise is as empty as the last, and where love, once bright, turns brittle and pale. To find oneself ensnared by a narcissist is to live a waking horror, a real-life ghost story where one’s own reflection fades away, replaced by a version the narcissist imposes—warped, fractured, foreign. The sweetness of early days corrodes into manipulation, a series of shifting lies and feigned apologies. What begins with allure ends with the gut-wrenching awareness of betrayal, a relentless haunting where one becomes both actor and victim in another’s grim fiction. Sometimes the “white knight” is your worst enemy.

Watch the video for “White Knight” below:

Derrick Perry, a filmmaker with roots in Virginia, carved his path through punk shows and guitar riffs, his teenage years alive with raw energy. Record collecting and DJing soon followed, leading to restless Brooklyn nights, lost in loft parties and club beats. There, he mastered the Akai MPC 2000, crafting electronic and sample-heavy sounds. A self-imposed hiatus redirected his focus to film, but Los Angeles called him back to music, reviving echoes of his past.

Angie Kang, a digital designer from Detroit’s outskirts, channels creativity through Cosmos Modern, a zero-waste online shop. As vocalist for Austin’s fierce Future Death, she shared stages with Melt-Banana and Circle Takes the Square. Under her techno alias Cell Trance and darkwave project Nonfiction, Angie conjures beats that pull from her electric, boundary-pushing past.

Listen to White Knight on Spotify below:

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