Photo by Alex Bex
French synthwave outfit GIIRLS isn’t your run-of-the-mill act: they construct a moody maze steeped in the grit of DEAD and FTR (EX-FUTURE). They’ve strayed from their noisy, shoegaze alleys, but never left them behind. Their synths open new doors—ones with creaky hinges and dim-lit rooms—each leading to fresh places for melody and meaning. There’s a deep nod to film scores and the pulse of basslines that could stir the dead. GIIRLS melds the cool, calculated beats of minimal synth and EBM with the raw nerve of rock and a haunting atmosphere, blurring the lines between genres and leaving you guessing which corner they’ll turn next.
Now GIIRLS is back with the beautiful LP Time of Glass, an album that explores more somber synthwave/electro sounds. There is a mix of both ’80s and modern moods, referencing several legendary bands like The Cure, Trisomie 21, Kavinsky, and The Soft Moon. In this album, the voice is a little more highlighted: a way to open his music to new horizons.
Pure opens with a stark loneliness that feels almost tactile, like the walls of a room closing in. There’s an echo in the vocals—a pleading, a desperate query to stave off the isolation, but the silence grows thick, and the words dissipate like smoke in the night air. The synth pads build a sort of anxious architecture, with their pulsing rhythms mimicking the rapid heartbeat of someone pacing their own thoughts at 3 a.m., each step deeper into an abyss of emotional disconnect.
Fears, featuring the fervent vocals of Modern Men, slinks into the crevices of a fractured relationship where trust has long since evaporated, leaving behind a residue of suspicion and dread. There’s a spectral quality to the track, the kind of cold that clings to you like dampness, the synths drawing from the icy wells of Disintegration-era Cure. This is less a song than a séance, an invocation of past ghosts and broken promises, each note echoing through a darkened room, lingering like the smell of something burning.
With Obscurity, GIIRLS tap into a different vein, a subterranean pulse that ripples beneath whispered vocals and a bassline that feels like it’s dredged up from some ancient, murky pool. Sharp synth lines act like shards of glass, slicing through the fog, leaving behind an unsettling melody that catches you off guard, like a strange noise in an abandoned house. The song is a slow bleed, the kind of tension that unfurls in the half-light, always threatening to collapse but never quite giving in, as if holding back some deeper, more ominous truth.
The coldwave crawl of Black Horse, featuring DEAD, brings with it a stripped-back intensity, a steady march through a landscape littered with emotional debris. There’s something ritualistic about the track’s dirge-like pace, the vocals cutting through with a clarity that feels almost surgical. The lyrics speak of transformation, from the earthbound to the ethereal—where black hooves are shed for wings, where the burden of hate is cast off, and flight becomes an act of rebellion. Here, the music becomes a vehicle for survival, a means of transcending the muck and mire of a world weighed down by its own ugliness.
Illness is an exercise in negation, a mantra of what’s gone and what’s left behind. The repetitive phrases and raw, almost primal vocal delivery tap into a sense of detachment that is both physical and metaphysical. The track feels like a document of loss, where each synth stab and each drumbeat marks another step away from something once known and now irretrievably lost. There is a starkness to it, a refusal to romanticize the pain, leaving only the cold, hard facts of separation and distance.
Asylum For Evil, featuring Francis Mallari of Rendez-Vous, feels like a grand, disillusioned sermon from the mount of a broken world. The lyrics speak to a kind of spiritual bankruptcy—a rejection of divinity and an embrace of a darker, more self-aggrandizing philosophy. The imagery is vivid and unrelenting: the world in decline, a self-appointed deity surveying the ruins. It’s a song that thrums with a nihilistic energy, choosing blasphemy and defiance over redemption.
The Last Song drifts in like a cool night breeze after a long, suffocating day. This instrumental piece plays like the soundtrack to a lonely walk under streetlights, where the city’s hum recedes and the stars come into sharper focus. It’s both expansive and intimate, a cosmic sigh anchored by a resonant synth bassline that balances the bittersweet with the serene. A perfect coda to an album that navigates the murky waters of emotion, searching for clarity in the haze.
Listen below and order the album here.
Time of Glass, mixed by Welt Motors and mastered by Sydney Valette, captures GIIRLS at a crossroads, where the echoes of past influences collide with a bold venture into new sonic landscapes. This is an album that doesn’t just wear its heart on its sleeve—it opens up a vein and lets it bleed.
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