In Tbilisi, where history still trembles in the concrete, DEAdpILOT stands as if tuning their instruments to the voltage of buried machines. Their new video for Shadow Walking Dopamine is another dispatch from the subterranean corridors of the post-Soviet underground: a blurred hymn to decay, desire, and disorientation.
The duo, Jack Hubbell and Saladin (Sunny), are alchemists of corrosion, fusing gothic post-punk, Eastern Bloc new wave, and electronic industrial into a sound that quivers with tension. This is music as circuitry and memory, each bassline a low hum of electricity, each vocal phrase a confession refracted in fractured glass.
The video mirrors that same mood. Shot originally on high-definition gear, the production was sabotaged by its own polish. The band, rejecting the crisp gloss of modern cinema, dragged the footage backwards through time, smearing it onto VHS until it acquired the battered aura of lost reels and clandestine screenings.
“There’s a specific look that Euro underground films from the 70s and 80s have — Soviet and Western alike. Things like DECODER or Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel,” explains Hubbell. “Re-transferring to VHS gave us the aesthetic we were really after.”
This act of deliberate distortion reshapes the material. The video stars Gvantsa Rekhviashvili and Michael Ninua, with their movements cutting between a band performance and portraits of vice: theft, graffiti, drugs, cheap liquor, and anonymous drifting through late-night streets. These fragments, held in the static blur of VHS, recall the phantom cinema of Fassbinder’s shadows or Tarkovsky’s damp stairwells. The work darts between faces and gestures until the ordinary becomes ominous, the banal suffused with dread. There are heavy nods to the 1927 silent film Metropolis, particularly in recreations of scenes of the Evil Maria at the mercy of leering men; her innocence dismantled by greed and lust. This juxtaposition of class and corruption transforms the video into a parable of collapse, where dopamine is pursued across neon-lit bars and damp walls, yet the desire remains unsatisfied. The blurred lens reveals more than the crisp could: vices as rituals, gestures as wounds, longing as residue.
Shadow Walking Dopamine bleeds time, reminding us that post-punk was always about ghosts of machines and the flesh that feeds them. DEAdpILOT locate an aesthetic honesty: that beauty, here, is best glimpsed through interference, decay, and the drone of an unstable signal. What remains is an image of modern Georgia refracted through analogue ruin, a project that knows nostalgia is never innocent; it is a distortion, and a strange kind of truth.
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