Seattle’s The Darts return with “Apocalypse,” the second advance single from their upcoming LP Halloween Love Songs, arriving March 3. Where “Midnight Creep” danced in B-movie shadows, “Apocalypse” blows the door off the darker half of the album, leaning into caveman rhythms, volcanic fuzz, and the kind of apocalyptic joy that makes destruction sound like deliverance. It marks the moment the record shifts from spooky fun into full-throttle, after-midnight fire.
The song was born in Angers, France, when singer/organ conjurer Nicole Laurenne wandered through the massive medieval Apocalypse Tapestry, a wall of woven chaos, angels, beasts, storms, the whole cosmic meltdown. “The lightning bolt struck me,” she says. “The song practically wrote itself in the van as we left the castle.” Instead of doom, Nicole leaned into the strange liberation of burning it all down: freedom from suffering, freedom from crowns, freedom from being told what comes next. She wrote the line “no future, no kings” as a mantra of release — and a year later, as if the song had cracked something open, “No Kings” erupted as a protest chant across the U.S. All while the track existed only as a demo on her laptop.
Musically, “Apocalypse” hits like a ritual. A pounding, Neanderthal beat through the verses, wide-open chant on the chorus, and those snaking organ lines that nod straight to The Seeds, The Standells, and other 60s greats who knew how to make the end of the world sound like a block-party with broken amps. Rebecca Davidson’s guitar tone drags the song into modern grit with thick, grimy Mudhoney fuzz, a little L7 bite, and flashes of Bikini Kill’s unbottled anger. It’s garage rock with a cracked halo, stomped through the dirt and set on fire.
Long before the album was finished, the band slipped “Apocalypse” into their live sets, and the audience reaction was immediate. People were yelling for it after shows, asking where they could buy it, treating it like a lost classic. When the studio version was finally tracked, Gretsch Guitars tapped the instrumental for a major ad, with Lindsay Scarey and Rebecca featured front and center. A quiet demo had somehow become one of the band’s most in-demand songs before it ever saw daylight.
Recorded at Station House Studio in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning producer Mark Rains, “Apocalypse” is the bridge into Halloween Love Songs’ after-midnight terrain: heavier, darker, louder, and built to shake rooms. It’s the sound of a band deep into its evolution with Nicole, Becca, Lindsay, and returning drummer Rikki Watson, pushing garage rock to its breaking point and finding something feral and euphoric on the other side. No future, no kings — just volume.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Chad at No Rules PR.]
