Darkside // Nothing
Post by Misha //
Darkside is a pretty foundational band for me. In that they were one of the first cultural objects I found out about completely on my own. I don’t remember exactly how or where I first heard their 2011 EP (probably a fairly significant Soundcloud binge was involved), but I remember being aware of having accidentally stumbled upon something that was still available to be accidentally stumbled upon. That flushed feeling of getting in on the ground floor. And I remember thinking that that EP was cool. Not cool in an of-the-moment way, or in an overly engineered way, just cool. There are things I felt this way about around the same time that I now look back on with a slightly less charitable gaze, but Darkside have basically retained their it factor for me.
(Possibly this is partly to do with their iconography. I have something like a fetish for internal consistency and find it very appealing when a band maintains an intentional aesthetic throughout their career. As such, their whole meditations-on-a-sphere album cover thing is deeply satisfying to me.)
Also, the moody mystique, the charmingly on-the-nose Pink Floyd references, the eerie, industrial Soundcloud remix of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, the seven year hiatus that came just as the band appeared to be taking off commercially. Darkside has always felt like a band at the fringes. Too polished and, frankly, rich-kid-coded to be DIY, yet too critically heralded to be written off as sellouts; too aloof to be splashily mainstream; too weird to dance to; too beep-boopy for the indie kids; too serious and instrumental to really cash in on the EDM trend. They exist in a Schrödinger’s twilight of both and neither. Both massively popular and shrouded in mystery.
Anyway, I was at one of the last shows they did before they went on hiatus, and the announcement of the hiatus hit me pretty hard, theirs being, as it were, the first metaphorical wagon I had hitched my own personal taste to. So when they came back during the pandemic it felt like a particularly well-timed apology. And when I first heard S.N.C a few months back, it was a little taste of the thrill they had first inspired in me. I don’t know if anything will ever get to me in quite the same way that those early projects did, but this comes pretty close.
Beyond that, this whole album is, for me personally, a little raft in time. Something that feels like a continuation, or a piece of a broader whole, in a sea of fragmentary senselessness.
Buy the new album, Nothing, here.