Fluorescent doll
Anemic sound
This empty daylight
Constant Williams has built Casket Cassette out of family ruin, bad weather of the soul, and the kind of memory that sits in your chest like a bent nail. Even the name feels like an object pulled from a box in the back of a closet and held up to the light with a shaky hand: a live recording made by his father, tucked into his grandfather’s casket, equal parts love token and burial rite. That’s heavy freight to drag into a song, and their latest single Kiss Me Awake carries it with the sickly grace of someone crossing the room after three days without sleep, trying to look composed while the floor keeps tilting.
The lyrics come dressed in hard light and failing flesh. Oxblood glamour sours at the edges. Fluorescence turns the room into a waiting area for spiritual collapse. Limbs and lips and hands show up as evidence rather than adornment, each image adding to the sense that the body has become an unreliable witness. Williams writes like a man staring into a mirror that has started lying to him.
The chorus drags poet Robert Lowell’s words through the club door by the collar and lets him speak the line that still lands like a brick through a church window: the self as inferno, the mind as a bad neighbourhood you can’t escape. Lowell got there by way of Milton, and Williams knows exactly how to put that literary wreckage to use. He doesn’t wave it around to look smart. He sinks it into the refrain where it belongs, as a confession that has been waiting centuries for the right drum machine and the right bruised voice.
Knowing that Williams’ family lost their home in the Los Angeles fires last year makes this hit harder, because the song already feels half-buried in ash and aftermath. You can hear a life singed at the edges without any need for grandstanding. That history gives Kiss Me Awake an extra ache, but the track never turns pious about suffering. It stays lean, diseased, romantic, and a little dangerous to stand too close to.
For anybody raised on Depeche Mode’s ache, Clan of Xymox’s night-bloom atmosphere, Kontravoid’s cold stare, Curses’ clubbed-up gloom, or Bootblacks’ bruised beauty, this thing lands square in the bloodstream. Kiss Me Awake feels like the kind of song you play when love has soured but you’re still dialing the number, still hoping somebody picks up…still standing half dead yet hopeful in the white buzz of daylight.
Listen to Kiss Me Awake below and order the single here.
Kiss Me Awake by Casket Cassette
Kiss Me Awake, mixed by Matia Simovich and mastered by Stefan Brown at Abbey Road Studios, is the first taste of REDUCER, their third LP, due in June, and the title alone tells you plenty. Reduction, redaction, erasure, isolation, the whole grim business of being pared down until you barely recognize your own outline. Williams wrote from that marginal state, and the song breathes with the stale air of a life temporarily stranded between departures. The romance at the center of it never offers comfort. It arrives wrapped in dependency, confusion, physical depletion, and that old rotten hope that another person might reach into the wreckage and switch the current back on.
Williams, who earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2024, will continue releasing new music through 2026. This May, Casket Cassette will make his debut at Wave Gotik Treffen, marking the beginning of an international expansion for the project. Casket Cassette will also be an official SXSW artist this year, playing multiple shows in Austin, as well as Sid the Cat this Friday in SoCal and headlining The Paramount in LA on April 3.
Catch Casket Cassette live:
SXSW 2026 – Austin, TX (Official Artist at SXSW)
March 6, 2026 – Sid the Cat – Southern California (Single Release Show)
March 15, 2026 – Grillo’s Pickles Pickle Party @ Hotel Vegas (Daytime)
March 16, 2026 – Official SXSW Showcase @ Chess Club
March 17, 2026 – Unofficial Tour Peachy Show (Daytime)
March 17, 2026 – BLCKJEANS MGMT Official Show @ Elysium
April 3, 2026 – The Paramount – Los Angeles (Special Headline Show)
All shows are on sale now.
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The post “This Empty Daylight” — Los Angeles Casket Cassette Unveils Dreamy Darkwave Single “Kiss Me Awake” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.