Photographs won’t bring me back
Lightness is a skill I lack
Faces of names I used to know
Years go fast, days go slow
Somewhere in Amsterdam, there’s a laptop glowing in the dark, and Raf Duran is staring straight into it, trying to figure out why the years feel like they’ve been quietly replaced behind his back. The man makes ‘synthpop for the Anthropocene,’ which sounds like a phrase cooked up in a think tank, but in practice it feels more like someone dancing in the kitchen while doing a light, traumatic doomscroll.
Duran calls it “music for dancing on the volcano,” and you get the idea quickly enough. The machines sparkle with that early-’80s electronic glow; the sort of clean lines you’d expect from someone raised on Depeche Mode, Fad Gadget, and the Pet Shop Boys, yet the mood belongs to this peculiar era where climate graphs rise like horror charts, and AI threatens to write your diary before you even live it.
The lead track, Mortified, co-produced with Sebastiaan Dutilh of the Dutch hyperpop duo CUT_, opens with this reality check: “I woke up halfway through the fall / In a body I don’t recall.” The lyric lands like a cold splash in the sink at three in the morning. Aging, memory, identity…the whole rattling parade of existential concerns, in fact, suddenly crowd the stage.
The video leans into that discomfort. A body stands in darkness, lit by a single beam, and Duran looks directly into the camera with a steadiness that calls up the stark intimacy of Sinéad O’Connor confronting the lens. There’s nowhere to hide in that frame. Just a face, a light, and the uneasy sense that time is quietly pushing everyone forward, whether they feel ready or not.
A 75-year-old friend appears in the video as well, dancing with a certain stiff grace that feels both funny and quietly heroic. The implication hangs there: this might be Duran decades down the line, still moving, still upright, still finding some way to keep rhythm in a world wobbling toward environmental collapse and geopolitical panic.
Watch below:
Morrow, the EP that houses Mortified, follows last year’s Cassandra. Where that earlier record stared outward at democracy cracking and war clouds gathering, this one turns the lens inward. Mortality creeps in close. Cheerful? Hardly. Necessary? Maybe more than most pop records care to admit. Someone has to talk about the end of the road. Raf Duran just happens to bring a drum machine to the conversation.
Listen to Mortified below and order Morrow here.
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The post “Years Go Fast, Days Go Slow” — Dutch Synthpop Artist Raf Duran Dances Between the Ages in Video for “Mortified” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
