Propaganda walks in plain clothes. It speaks soft, with a neighbour’s voice, a preacher’s poise, a lover’s hush. It sidles up beside you at supper, murmurs in headlines, hums behind hymns. With careful cadence, it kindles fury or fans desire; it makes a soldier out of a schoolboy, a glutton out of a saint. One day, you’re building a garden; the next, you’re marching toward smoke. It doesn’t need truth…just repetition, rhythm, and the right shade of fear. It turns men into martyrs, women into warnings, children into collateral. It sells war like salvation and lust like liberty. You don’t notice its weight until it’s woven through your will; until you hunger for what you once found hollow, until you strike at a face you’ve never seen. And by the time you see the strings, you’re already dancing. That’s its genius. Not in the shouting. But in the silence it leaves behind.
War Candy hits like a back-alley parade: swaggering bass, tight-laced drums, and guitars that jab like switchblades. The Slashes (Esteban Rene, Beto Bautista, Carlos Robles) summon ghosts from San Diego’s borderlands and grind them into buoyant bravado. There’s a skip in the beat, a snarl in the voice, and a simmer beneath it all that smells like something sweet about to burn.
Time bends here: punk’s past pushed through postmodern pulp, noir swagger with nervous sweat. It’s hips and heartbreak, delivered in a package that struts as much as it seethes. War Candy stalks nostalgia, breaks its kneecaps, and makes it dance. This is “border goth” with bite and brass, sound built for dim-lit bars, last cigarettes, and the beautiful ache of a song that knows better.
“War Candy was a title casually tossed while Bukowski’s Love Is A Dog From Hell was being dog-eared in our downtime, but aligns perfectly with those themes and imagery of bathroom stalls, 1930s propaganda and faded heroes,” says the band. “War Candy serves as the silver screen to project an imaginary war film whose celluloid never saw the light of day-or it’s the dreamy documentary of our own wanton desires.”
Listen to War Candy below and order the track here.
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