No one turn the lights on,
I’ve seen it all before, it’s dying
Modern Friend is the latest endeavour of Voytek Korab, whose career in underground electronic music spans two decades and a world map of clubs and festivals. Having co-founded My Favorite Robot and lived the itinerant life of a touring DJ, Korab now returns to the elemental task of writing songs. Together with Kosta Megalos of Flowers and Sea Creatures, he has formed a duo in Montreal. Their first single, Someone’s Gotta Save Us, offers an analysis of contemporary malaise through the framework of post-punk electronica.
The work is defined less by style than by its diagnosis of a political and cultural void. The refrain, “someone’s gonna save ’em,” encapsulates the passive faith in outside rescue that marks much of modern civic life. Other lines expand on the pathology: cycles of outrage that collapse without consequence. “Just when you think you’re finally rid of it, it rears its ugly head again” names the relentlessness of these failures. “Nothing’s gonna save us” is their hypothesis: a challenge to rethink agency.
The video, directed by Matus Racek of www.5443.ca, accompanying the single, underscores this thesis. Shot in the idiom of retro digital and VHS, overlaid with early-2000s effects, it simulates a broadcast from a lost archive. The aesthetic is deliberate: the band appears to be transmitting from the margins of history, warning against repetition. It is artifice as allegory, a cultural artifact announcing that lessons ignored return to haunt the next generation.
Watch the video for Someone’s Gotta Save Us below:
The album Nothing Out Of Something, due on Permaculture Music, has gestated over nearly a decade. Its influences: post-punk, new wave, synthwave, are continuations of traditions that once aimed to map alienation in the industrial age. Mixed in London by Justin Drake and mastered in Mexico by Ali X, the record situates itself within a transnational network of producers who still believe in the global reach of independent music.
The very title Nothing Out Of Something gestures toward paradox, the making of meaning from absence. Its lyrical core of fragility, loss, and the failure of systems is balanced by the act of composition itself. For Korab, “residing with his demons in his hometown of Montreal,” the move from decks to microphone is itself a form of resistance. For Megalos, the shift from collaborative electronic projects to a duo format restores a directness often lost in digital mediation.
Order the single on Bandcamp here
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