MALWAVE, an Ontario duo with a taste for electro, post-rock, dark dance, vapour haze, and experimental drift, land with their second single, Forever Chemical. The single belongs to the year’s ongoing MALWAVE rollout, and it carries itself like a transmission from some damp, ecstatic corner of the future where Mogwai, Daft Punk, and Darkside have all been shoved into the same flooded elevator and told to make peace before the power cuts out.
The track starts with experimental electro beats that twitch and roll with a strange aquatic logic, neither settling into club comfort nor collapsing into art-school drift. Synthwave keyboards spread across the frame in glossy sheets, while the cold post-punk guitar riff supplies the human ache: melody-filled, beautiful lines that bend through the track with a wounded elegance, trading cheap prettiness for something stranger and more bodily. Then come the experimental leads, little shards of nervous light, and layered vocals that appear less like a singer stepping forward than voices caught in the tank, moving around the listener in warped, weightless circles.
Forever Chemical moves with purpose, even when it wanders into vapourous passages and post-rock sprawl. It has the patience of people who understand the value of an idea being allowed to mutate, grow fins, and swim off into the briny deep. The track’s dystopian mood feels akin to the nauseous thrill of staring at a screen too long.
The video pushes that feeling into full psychedelic absurdity: an underwater performance populated by groovy jellyfish and schools of fish moving through the frame. In the context of a song called Forever Chemical, those fish carry more than visual charm. They suggest the first casualties of poisoned water, tiny bodies at the front line of damage, humans prefer to keep abstract until it turns up in the glass, the bloodstream, the child, the shore. The clip’s aquatic beauty becomes a warning with fins: all that colour, all that motion, all that life suspended in a fragile blue world we keep treating like a sewer drain.
Forever Chemical suggests MALWAVE are chasing a peculiar future: dance music with saltwater in its lungs, post-rock with a mutant pulse, electronic music that keeps asking whether the machine can still feel panic. The schools of fish serve as a reminder of what is at stake before the damage becomes headline, lawsuit, bottled-water advisory, or family secret. MALWAVE dress the warning in motion and strange light, but beneath the psychedelic glow is a blunt little fact: the future always reaches the water first.
Watch the video for Forever Chemical below:
MALWAVE’s new single, Forever Chemical, is out. Listen below and order here.
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