My inner demon is hungry for affection
666 catches my fucking attention
Every single time the devil wants my mention
I push my fingers into my eyes to ease the tension
There was a stretch at the turn of the millennium when music videos seemed convinced that the subconscious had a television set of its own. Ashtrays glowed like religious relics, scratched film stock became emotional punctuation, and every cut suggested that somebody had stayed awake for three days trying to explain the inside of their skull. Jakarta’s GHO$$ tap into that visual bloodstream with 666, a dark-pop and trip-hop fever dream directed by Mellow Splice that feels less interested in nostalgia than in proving those old tricks still possess enough voltage to rattle the nerves.
Formed in 2014, GHO$$ have spent years threading together dark pop, trip-hop, alternative music, and the smoky residue of ’90s R&B and hip-hop into their own unique fusion. Their debut full-length, The Whitest Blackout, serves as the conceptual counterpart to 2017’s The Blackest Whiteout. Where the earlier release dwelled in disappearance, this record searches for the painful return of consciousness after trauma, asking what recovery looks like once the lights come back on and reveal the wreckage waiting in the room.
666 burrows into that uneasy territory with boom-bap drums, jazz-tinted instrumentation, deep bass, and vinyl scratching inspired by Geoff Barrow’s work with Portishead. There is some of Massive Attack’s narcotic weight in the low end and Tricky’s paranoid intimacy in the vocals, while the beat carries the dusty snap of a forgotten hip-hop twelve-inch. Elsewhere, GHO$$ share Gorillaz’s appetite for collapsing genre boundaries and The Avalanches’ sense that discarded textures can be reassembled into strange new emotional machinery.
The accompanying video translates that emotional static into a kaleidoscope of tactile images. Performance footage collides with boiling oil, burning cigarettes, flashing strobes, and psychedelic textures that appear for only an instant before dissolving into the next collision. Shot by Moses Sihombing and Hafizh Armynazrie, the photography treats ordinary objects as psychological evidence. A cigarette becomes a countdown. Bubbling oil resembles a mind overheating under pressure. Every flash interrupts the previous image before certainty has time to settle.
Mellow Splice’s editing functions like memory itself: fractured, repetitive, occasionally absurd, forever interrupting the present with another sensation. The pacing keeps the eye alert without collapsing into random excess, finding an exhilarating balance between precision and delirium. It recalls the inventive visual language that filled MTV and MuchMusic during the late ’90s and early 2000s, when directors happily raided experimental cinema, skate videos, photocopiers, horror films, and television static for inspiration.
Watch the video for 666 below:
Listen to 666 below and order The Whitest Blackout here.
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