Render your mind, our bodies entwine, as demons bloom, from the inside.
Bustié’s Cruel Intentions is a bona fide piece of subterranean pop excavation: metallic bass synths and orchestra hits grind and glint while bongo-pad percussion taps out a pulse that feels borrowed from fuzzy memories – perhaps handing off an illicit bootleg mixtape on the school bus, or an older sibling slipping you the good stuff that might piss off your Mom and Dad. The track moves with the certainty of something rehearsed in private and revealed sparingly, in a collision of minimal wave, dark disco, and ritualistic synthpop.
Angelika Padilla’s smooth vocal, commanding yet unguarded, threads through the machinery, its lineage tracing a line between Anne Clark’s spoken-word severity, ZE Records languid chanteuses, and Soma Holiday’s cool detachment. Minimal wave, dark disco, and synthpop fold inward on themselves, less a fusion than a set of overlapping disciplines. This is club music with rules, desire articulated as risk.
The video insists on control: movement exists within limits: repeated gestures, calibrated shifts of weight, arms slicing the air with purpose rather than flourish. Padilla, performing as Pogo Pope, anchors the frame through composure, her presence defined by restraint. Nothing is wasted. Every action feels counted…and intimidating.
Shot and edited by Oslo Maeve at Brooklyn’s Vicious Kind Studio, the visuals favour dark interiors and compressed spaces, environments that heighten bodily awareness. Tru Wright, Andre Molina, Esmé Figueroa, and Eros Hedonista appear, often reclined or held in place. A raised arm reads as a signal; a sustained pose becomes confrontation. The performers seem governed by an unseen code, echoing the track’s fixation on desire bound tightly to consequence. In this eerie world, intimacy is negotiated, provisional, and edged with caution.
Watch the video for “Cruel Intentions” below:
Bustié locks coldwave severity against freestyle gloss, letting heartbreak and resistance occupy the same floor. Comparisons are easy: Beta Evers, Animal Bodies, Hard Corps – but ultimately beside the point. This is its own proposition: ‘Anarcho Body Music,’ a queer-forward genre designed for motion, confrontation, and reclamation.
Listen to Cruel Intentions below and order the single here.
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