Fuse the dark decadence of Lydia Lunch, PJ Harvey, and Siouxsie Sioux with the electronic southern gothic beguile of Chelsea Wolfe, Interpol-esque guitar lines and the trip-hop aesthetic of Massive Attack, and you’ll alchemise a sound as scintillating as the atmosphere within Liya Shapiro’s debut single, The Thing, which officially released on December 15.
After a sequence of stabbing synths that could have been torn from a John Carpenter score, post-punk synthetics start to bleed into the hypnotism of the production which leaves discordant effects to linger in the shadows, harbingering a forboding energy, as striking as the avant-garde tones within Glenn Branca’s The Ascension.
Once you’ve torn yourself away from the grip of the instrumental magnetism, you’ll lock into the lyrical poetry as it elucidates the intangible nature of love. By using dark, almost nihilistically macabre, imagery between the sweetly abstract sentiments, dualism drives through the debut from the London-based singer-songwriter, whose lyrical ambiguity opens a labyrinth of corridors in the mind as you attempt to extrapolate meaning.
The abstractions within the poetry also serve to prevent the single from becoming a derivatively paradoxical debut. To speak of the unspeakable and pretend to possess a firm grip of an incomprehensible emotional and spiritual phenomenon would only cheapen the track which pays a true ode to the ephemeral and constantly in flux constructs of love.
We can’t wait to hear what Liya Shapiro has in the pipeline for her sophomore release.
Stream The Thing on all major platforms via this link.
Review by Amelia Vandergast
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