Watch her run for a box of rations
Watch the sky split open wide
Hear her name shouted from above
She gave her life, so that we could survive
IIn their new single “Cinders,” Tears for the Dying turn desolation into defiance, delivering a dirge that smolders beneath the ash. The Southern Gothic duo—Adria Stembridge and Page Dukes—have long lingered between post-punk’s skeletal austerity and deathrock’s florid decay, but here their fire burns for something more profound. “Cinders” is a hymn for the fallen and the faithful alike—an elegy for those who gave everything so others might go on, a salute to the ones who stood against the dark so the rest of us could keep fighting toward the light.
The song opens like a confession muttered in the smoke of a burned cathedral: the drum machine stutters like a pulse gone weak, synth bass hums with funereal gravity, and Stembridge’s voice hovers at the precipice between grief and fury. Her refrain, This Earth, there is that which deserves life, becomes a mantra recited through clenched teeth, invoking the words of Mahmoud Darwish’s 1986 poem On This Earth. Translated from Arabic, it becomes less a line than a lifeline: a fragile assertion that meaning still flickers even in the heart of annihilation.
In the verses, Stembridge sketches vignettes of a people caught in the machinery of genocide: boots echoing through stairwells, gunfire below, the sickly light beneath a door. Each image lands with the stark finality of reportage, yet her delivery is elegiac, imbued with the fatal glamour of the Southern gothic tradition: decaying beauty, faith corrupted, love turning to martyrdom. Dukes’s guitar, all serrated shimmer and feedback haze, sounds like memory dissolving into static. Together, they conjure an atmosphere where despair becomes holy…a candle lit for what’s already lost. There’s a tragic nobility to that gesture, a sense of standing upright as floodwaters rise.
More than just a timely protest song, written in an era that seems to grow darker with each passing day, “Cinders” is a poignant Gothic Rock requiem—a meditation on survival steeped in the cost of endurance. By its final moments, the returning refrain sheds its plea and transforms into a vow, a declaration that even amid the rubble, life endures and insists on being seen.
“Cinders” is not a song of consolation but of remembrance—a lament for the fallen and a spark for those who remain. It stands as both elegy and call to endurance, sung to honor the dead and steel the living.
Listen below and order the single here.
Catch Tears For The Dying live:
- Oct 25 – Athens, GA – Southern Gothic Festival
- Nov 8 – New York,NY – The Red Party
- Nov 9 – Richmond, VA – Fallout
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