I heard the horns and saw lights flashing red
You were on your knees with guns to your head
and I saw you dying, too
I saw you dying, too
New York City’s Like What strides boldly through five years of cinematic synthpop colliding headlong with crisp, icy darkwave. To mark this half-decade milestone, they’ve unleashed the aptly titled Anniversary Anthology, an EP capturing the project’s most resonant tracks, a distilled retrospective shimmering with minimalist mystique and futuristic flair. It arrives alongside a surreal, monochrome video for their first-ever single, Dark is the Night, an art-house dream soaked in glitchy dadaism, pop culture snippets, and stark, alien vistas.
Emerging from pandemic solitude, Like What seized the unlikely tools of an iPad and a guitar, channeling quarantine isolation into music echoing the brittle chill of Kraftwerk and Neu!, the stark urgency of Grauzone, and Gary Numan’s synthetic pulse. Their method defies convention; it thrives in limitation, building sparse compositions that capture the eerie glow and noirish tension of classic 80s darkwave.
Lyrically, “Dark is the Night” delves into chilling visions of loss and inevitability, painting stark imagery of violent demise amid shadowy dreamscapes. Haunting lines vividly portray helplessness and intimate tragedy, amplifying the unsettling tension between reality and nightmare. The video for Dark Is the Night especially embodies this ethos: cold, unsettling, and visually hypnotic, as it mirrors the song’s unsettling beauty: a feverish montage of distorted faces, surreal landscapes, and cryptic symbolism, conjuring nightmares in rhythmic flashes of black and white.
Watch the video for “Dark Is The Night” below:
Anniversary Anthology gathers Like What’s standout selections, each song a polished shard of shadowy pop, propelled by dark cinematic lyricism infused with horror and film noir. This anthology captures the daring spirit and distinct aesthetic that Like What has meticulously cultivated. Each track pulses with a controlled minimalism that is artful, bold, and electrifyingly cold. Five years in, Like What proves that constraint breeds brilliance, crafting compact masterpieces.
Listen to Dark Is The Night below and order Anniversary Anthology here.
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