Renounce your essence
Mercy won’t come
The hate is relentless
Embrace what you’ve become
Humanity has an impressive talent for inventing elaborate systems of belief and then allowing those same systems to devour whatever individuality made life worth living in the first place. Give a desperate man a promise of salvation, a handful of commandments, and somebody sufficiently charismatic to explain why his suffering is necessary, and he’ll practically volunteer for his own psychological execution. History is littered with people who surrendered their judgment in exchange for certainty, mistook obedience for virtue, and discovered far too late that the road to redemption sometimes leads straight into the mouth of the beast. Somewhere in this miserable transaction, devotion becomes dependency, guilt becomes a form of currency, and the soul gets sold for the dubious privilege of belonging to something greater than itself.
Albuquerque, New Mexico’s UNATONED, a new darkwave, post-punk, and gothic rock project formed by Andres Diaz, Sidney San Gil, and Hissan Orozco, examines this particular human catastrophe with their debut single, Essence, an immediately infectious piece of gothic decadence concerned with the spiritual consequences of surrendering one’s identity to an all-consuming belief system.
Musically, Essence is catchy as hell, drawing upon the sleek electronic seduction of Depeche Mode, the spectral romanticism of Altar De Fey, the gothic grandeur of Octavian Winters, and the muscular post-punk propulsion of The Bellwether Syndicate. The electronics establish an atmosphere of impending catastrophe, while melodic guitars wind through driving rhythms with the sort of theatrical urgency that makes personal damnation seem an almost enjoyable recreational activity. There is considerable sophistication in the arrangement, particularly in how its accessible hooks coexist with the music’s more sinister inclinations. The result is a splendidly infectious introduction to a band already displaying an ear for gothic melodrama.
Lyrically, Essence confronts the dissolution of individuality through religious and ideological submission, following a tormented figure whose desperate pursuit of absolution becomes an exercise in self-annihilation. Guilt festers into hatred, forgiveness slips beyond reach, and the promise of transcendence culminates in spiritual bankruptcy. The song’s imagery of blood, martyrdom, and fallen angels gives this psychological deterioration a distinctly biblical character, suggesting that the road to damnation may occasionally be paved with the finest intentions.
The accompanying music video, filmed and directed by Oscar Montez in Albuquerque, translates these anxieties into a nocturnal gothic nightmare. Wandering deserted streets, the central figure eventually finds himself pleading before a candlelit altar occupied by a cloaked skeleton, an image that brings the song’s preoccupation with corrupted faith and spiritual extinction into particularly delicious focus. Death, apparently, has opened a confessional, although the prospects for absolution look decidedly poor.
Watch the video for Essence below:
For their first outing, UNATONED have delivered an impressively assured declaration of intent, combining irresistible darkwave hooks with the existential horror of discovering that salvation might require the complete destruction of everything you once were.
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