From the frostbitten streets of Montréal comes a transmission of cold intensity and unfiltered emotion. Under the moniker NO, the artist delivers Desire Kills — a new LP released this summer on the UK label Tonn Recordings. It’s an album that throbs with urgency, marrying raw post-punk energy to an unprocessed synth minimalism that refuses to sit still.
Drawing inspiration from the cutting edges of early electronic subversion — Fad Gadget, Public Image Ltd., and the glacial melodicism of The Cure — NO distills those influences into something both visceral and immediate. His voice carries a compelling nihilistic charge, threading dark lyricism over an undercurrent of pulsing rhythm. The result is a sound that feels alive and unvarnished — synths that hum like faulty wiring, beats that grind forward with industrial insistence, and melodies that never lose their sense of urgency.
The lead single and title track, “Desire Kills Desire,” distills the album’s core tension — longing as both fuel and poison. It begins like a midnight confession before surging into a relentless pulse that blurs pleasure with despair. Its lyrics trace a fevered exchange of dominance and devotion, where sleep becomes both refuge and trap, and desire slips into regret — a dream spiraling toward oblivion.
Across Desire Kills, NO doesn’t so much perform as confront. His songs pulse with the immediacy of human contact in a digital void — always catchy, always urgent. It’s a world where desire is the only thing left that feels real, even as it corrodes everything around it.
Desire Kills is available on a Limited Edition 12″ Vinyl LP. Listen to the album below, and order here:
NO has been a consistent presence in the underground since 2020, cultivating a body of work that charts the evolution of his stark, analog-driven style. His earlier releases — Permanent Wound (2020), Domestic Pulse (2022), Wave Function (2023), and the collaborative project NO + ANA with Ana Gartner — established him as a vital voice in the new post-industrial continuum emerging from Montréal’s scene.
With Desire Kills, he sharpens that vision into something leaner and more confrontational — a distillation of the emotional volatility that drives his work. Synths shimmer and distort, vocals teeter between intimacy and detachment, and the tension never lets up.
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