We enter each relationship as architects and archeologists. building while unearthing, shaping while sifting through shared histories. At first, we speak in future tense, laying foundations from laughter and longing; but over time, roles shift: the nurturer becomes the neglected, the dreamer turns doubter, the fixed point begins to drift. Some carry the weight, others retreat into silence. We become mirrors, scaffolds, strangers, yet in each turning, we’re changed, softened, sharpened, undone. Whether it ends in ruin or renewal, we leave profoundly changed: revised by love’s architecture, restructured by what we gave, and what was taken.
Destroyer, the latest dispatch from Seattle’s Mutual Shock, feels less like a song and more like a slow-burning collapse. Dan Powers, helming the solo project with steely precision, splices synthpop seduction with cold wave corrosion, soldering analogue synths to bone-dry drum machines until they spark. Influences stretch from the grayscale gloom of Black Marble and Molchat Doma to the industrial bite of NIN and the minimal muscle of Cabaret Voltaire. There’s something delightfully jagged beneath the track’s sheen: hooks laced with disquiet, rhythms that twitch and tangle. Destroyer hums with unease, a dark synthpop missive scrawled in lowercase heartbreak.
“Destroyer is about the nature of a relationship changing, and coming to understand the new terms and how you’ve been a part of shaping them, even though we often avoid taking that introspective look,” says Powers. “The video examines that theme further, as I’m haunted by the feeling of being pursued and chased by something, and can’t bring myself to look inward, until time and circumstance leave me no choice.”
The video for Destroyer, directed by Caleb Young of Seattle’s Hand Crank Films, spirals into paranoia with a warped wink. A man stalked by a familiar figure—perhaps a double, perhaps a delusion—wanders through suburban stillness and fluorescent purgatories, his every move mirrored by something just out of reach. The camera lingers, leers, loops back. There’s a deadpan dread here, recalling the classic video for I’m Afraid of Americans, the off-kilter malaise of Twin Peaks, and the existential unraveling of the Time Enough At Last episode of The Twilight Zone and Maya Deren’s Meshes Of The Afternoon. Familiar streets blur into strange terrain; the uncanny coils like smoke through sliding doors and parking lots. Time hiccups, identity fractures, and the self becomes a spectator. This is horror by accumulation, of glances, gestures, and the quiet creep of recognition. Destroyer becomes less a song and more a symptom, the video its fevered hallucination, scratched into reel-to-reel déjà vu. A beautiful piece of unsettling surrealism.
Watch the video for “Destroyer” below:
2024 saw the release of debut EP Stimulus Progression, exemplified by the pulsating, metronomic beats of tracks “Inheritance” and “Getaway.” His first full-length release, Nervous Systems, comes out May 29.
Listen to Destroyer below and order the track here.
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