The elite the corrupted
They’ve known for centuries
How to keep us blinded and starving
While they can live fat upon our corpses
Washington, D.C. gives us 2DCAT, a dark synthpop duo with the sort of backstory that turns the usual press-kit credentials into something far stranger, sturdier, and more alive. Johan Hauck builds most of the hardware synthesizers the duo performs with, which means the machinery here is not some rented glow-box blinking politely in the corner, but a homemade electrical animal with wires for veins and bad intentions in its little metal heart. HAEZL, meanwhile, comes from the opera world, having shared stages with Patti LaBelle, Cynthia Erivo, and Renée Fleming, and that gives 2DCAT a vocal caliber dark synthpop rarely gets: lungs, teeth, diction, and gravitas.
Eat the Rich is the moment the velvet curtain gets yanked down and used to start a fire. The song takes class rage out of the op-ed column and puts it in the public square. Its world is divided with the bluntness of a brick through stained glass: the fed and the feeding, the ruined and the ruling, the families scraping by while some distant class of lizards counts the coins and calls it civilization. The repeated title phrase becomes less slogan than appetite: somebody has been dining for centuries, and now the table manners are gone.
The genius of the track is its lack of dainty pleading. There is no petition being passed around, no well-lit panel discussion, no rich man’s child discovering empathy during a semester abroad. 2DCAT goes straight for the old revolutionary theater: guillotine, blood, fire, the grand machinery of consequence. You can feel the song staring at the polite lie that suffering must always remain dignified, then kicking that lie down a flight of stairs. Its violence is rhetorical, theatrical, and deliberately ugly in the way a cracked mirror is ugly when it finally tells the truth.
The black-and-white video, directed by Johan Hauck, puts this fury inside an abandoned factory, which is exactly where it belongs. Those long shots of dead industry feel like a funeral for labour itself: empty halls, cold walls, the skeletal remains of a place where bodies once turned time into profit for somebody else. There is something chilling about seeing the corpse of work stripped of workers, as if the building has outlived the people it consumed. The imagery is simple, severe, and all the better for it.
Watch the video for Eat The Rich below:
2DCAT’s ‘Eat the Rich’ resonates more deeply because of its placement in the overall emotional progression. Conversely, the earlier single ‘Salvation Will Not Come’ leaves us in silence once hope is broken, with prayer becoming just a formality and idols looking back with cold, marble-like indifference.
“Eat the Rich started where Salvation Will Not Come left off,” says Johan Hauck. “That song was the silence after hope runs out. This song is the one that breaks the silence.” That line nails the record’s cruel little engine: hope drains out, anger walks in wearing its coat, and suddenly 2DCAT are no longer mapping despair from a safe distance. They are standing in the wreckage with a homemade synthesizer, an opera-trained voice, and a match.
Listen to Eat The Rich below and order the album here.
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The post “Keep Us Blinded and Starving” — DC Dark Synthpop Duo 2DCAT Take Class Rage to the Factory Floor in Video for “Eat The Rich” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
