Portland post-punk five piece Soft Kill share their third single, ‘Floodgate” featuring singer-songwriter Tamaryn, taken from their forthcoming November 20th album release “Dead Kids, R.I.P. City”, the long-awaited follow up to 2018’s ‘Savior’. Says the band’s Tobias Grave, “Floodgate is about unraveling mentally and pushing away your lifelines. It’s about being trapped in solitude, suffocating in a world you created.”
The band have shared two other singles these past few weeks; “Pretty Face”, which encapsulates listeners with its steady pulse of bass and cinematic-like guitar melodies, taking a slightly left field approach to post-punk with its triumphant and upbeat energy. That followed the lead doom and gloom pop single “Roses All Around‘, which is dark yet luminous in every sense, from its driving percussive beats, harmonic grooves and melodies, while also creating an opportunity to openly discuss its sociopolitical message that is especially prominent now as Portland became the epicenter of unrest these past few months.
Soft Kill had been growing with pretty much every record – but a deep maturation, achieving a level of emotional intensity that, even for a band known for exactly that, was nothing short of awe-inspiring and inarguably a high water mark. The question then, was how do they possibly follow that up? Well, here we are, two years later with Dead Kids, R.I.P. City, and we can all set down our worry beads. Soft Kill, Tobias Grave, Conrad Vollmer, Owen Glendower, Daniel Deleon and Nicole Colbath, have in fact put any such concerns commandingly to rest.
Two years in the making, desperate, redemptive, its contrast of light and shadow favoring the latter, Dead Kids, R.I.P. City is like no other album in the genre, featuring the brave and abandoned, the tender and the afflicted, all teetering in memory on the edge of the city. For all the sadness and pain of addiction haunting it, however, the record, by its very existence, proves that hope doesn’t necessarily win but that, even if at great cost, it can. It’s what makes Dead Kids, R.I.P. City so powerful beyond just the scope of its dark luminous sound and indelible melodies, and is one of the many reasons you’ll carry it with you.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Jo Murray.]
