Drenched in cataclysm and curled in dystopian dread, Qual—William Maybelline’s fierce alter ego—seizes the bleak landscape of Funeral Fashion as both muse and battleground. This track slams and thrums with industrial fury, conjuring the unholy spirit of NIN, Front Line Assembly, and Skinny Puppy in a dark, throbbing underworld.
Maybelline casts Qual as the warped anti-hero in a psychotic epic, plunging headfirst into an electronic abyss, like a rogue star veering off course to crash in the unforgiving dark of some apocalyptic planet, a world drenched in synth and decay.
In stark contrast to the primeval melancholia of Lebanon Hanover, Funeral Fashion distills its sound into something rawer, more primal—a furious, animalistic rage bound tightly in relentless industrial beats. It thrashes and pulses with intensity, each note clawing forward in frenzied anger. It’s an intense listen, but its force feels entirely earned, as each pound drives deeper. With a relentless beat and eerie synths driving forward, Funeral Fashion marries Maybelline’s rawness with a grinding pulse, each note a dirge for civilization, each beat the pulse of a post-industrial wasteland. In this violent vignette, Qual revels in his apocalypse, haunting the space between defiance and doom, bound to the rhythm of our own unraveling.
The artist lays bare the scene: “Septic discharges of cybernetic disease seeps from every orifice. Welcoming a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter. With terror and restless chaos cometh the digital age condemned to be digitally transformed. Cometh hybrids, mutated humans, a depletion of organics.”
Funeral Fashion paints a stark portrait of death draped in dark allure—a figure clothed head to toe in black, lips painted blood-red, moving with a chilling grace that whispers of decay. This figure isn’t shying from mortality; rather, it strides boldly through the morbid, exuding a cold beauty born of bone and burial. Here, death isn’t hidden but adorned, worn like a fashion—elegance laced with the stillness of rigour mortis. Bones clash beneath, echoing in empty chambers, while a golden sarcophagus gleams like a relic in a tomb’s dim light.
This world is shaped by the cold and cryptic, each image a step closer to the grave, each symbol a nod to life’s fleeting hold. The track embraces the solemn spectacle of existence’s end, as if to remind us that beauty, however lifeless, lingers even at the edge of oblivion, glittering in death’s unforgiving grasp.
The video for “Funeral Fashion,” an incredible graphic/visual work by a team of artists, was directed by Tamas Mesmer, and DP Ford and Samuel Capps animated the video.
Watch the video below:
Listen to Funeral Fashion at the link below, and order the Techsick EP here.
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