Violent empathy
Bloodline destiny
Obsession atrocity
Murder ideology
BLXCKFLAMINGO’s latest single, Last Rites, arrives like a black car idling outside an abandoned church, engine coughing, headlights sickly, somebody in the back seat muttering prayers they no longer believe. The Jersey City duo: Kevin Garetz on vocals, guitar, and synth, Roberto Miranda on bass, vocals, and synth, work in that cold corner where darkwave pops its coat collar up and walks straight into the pea soup fog.
Last Rites is a song built on drum-machine insistence, with bass that moves like a threat in a hallway, and synths that spread out in pale, poisonous sheets. Garetz’s baritone comes through with priestly rot and club-bathroom menace, whispered from behind a locked door. The track has the black-glass polish of Drab Majesty, the funereal romance of Clan of Xymox and Lebanon Hanover, the western-goth dread of Fields of the Nephilim, and a touch of Molchat Doma’s Brutalist apartment-block chill, but BLXCKFLAMINGO keep the ritual close to home. Jersey City never sounded so much like a candlelit basement under a collapsing republic.
The lyrics are all appetite and alarm: morbid curiosity, erotic violence, obsession turned into ideology, ritual desire repeating like a curse someone keeps enjoying too much to break. There is a political sickness implied here, a sense that power has its private ceremonies and its polished knives, while the rest of us get the sermon, the spectacle, and the bill. The song leans into occult imagery; its altar is psychological as much as ceremonial, a place where lust, control, dread, and devotion get smeared together until the difference stops mattering.
Last Rites refuses to tidy up the ugliness where modern anxiety has gone feral. The news cycle already feels like ritual abuse performed by men in expensive rooms; BLXCKFLAMINGO simply turns that atmosphere into a coldwave cut with enough bite to leave a mark. The beat keeps pushing forward, strict and sleepless, while the guitars and synths blur into a fevered haze around it.
By the time the final invocation lands, Last Rites feels less like a song about death than a song about what people will do when they think the old gods, old laws, and old moral brakes have stopped working. Decadence sounds dangerous, which is rarer than it should be.
Listen to Last Rites below and order the single here.
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