They have denied the blood
That is on their hands
And invisible bodies cover their disguise
Diavol Strâin comes roaring back with 11 Ecos like somebody kicked open the doors to a sealed chamber and let all the old curses, all the state lies, all the bloodstained memories come spilling across the floor in a rush of black smoke and broken glass. This is the first shot from Eterno Retorno, and brother, it lands with the kind of force that makes you sit up straight and wonder what exactly got disturbed in the walls.
For a band already carrying close to eleven years of hard-earned history, Lau M and Ignacia Strain, bona fide icons of Chilean and Latin American darkwave, sound possessed by fresh purpose here, as if they found a deeper wound to press until the room changed colour. The track drags the memory of dictatorship and civic terror into the present tense, and it does so with a terrible elegance, with guitars stacked in great collapsing sheets and rhythm moving underneath it all like boots down a corridor.
11 Ecos hit carries historical violence without turning into a lecture or museum placard. The Spanish-language track feels feverish and full of pressure. The lyrics circle rage, pain, ruined hope, exile, numbness, torture, and the sleazy theatre of power, where the guilty hide their hands and the dead keep walking beside the living. There is menace in that vision, and there is also sorrow in the older, heavier sense of the word: communal hurt, the kind that gets passed from body to body, year to year, until it starts to feel like leather.
The video, directed and edited by Lau M, pushes the song further into a world of symbolic horror. A strange bacchanalian feast unfolds in a red velvet room, performance footage cutting through the ritual like a blade. The imagery has that Lynchian perfume, and there is a trace of The Hunger in the whole decadent pageant, with fruit, bodies, ghosts, and power all slipping into one another until you start asking the right question: what exactly are these people becoming? “We took it to more symbolic imagery, we wanted to represent characters who wield political power, with an esoteric and tense aesthetic, a focus on violence and the idea of ghosts that haunt and frighten people because of their actions,” says the duo’s vocalist and bassist.
Watch the video for 11 Ecos below:
…And then there is the muscle behind the Diavol Strâin’s latest record. Pablo Giadach handled the sessions at Estudio Lautaro, and William Faith took care of mixing and mastering, which gives the whole enterprise extra weight, extra reach, extra poison in the perfume bottle. 11 Ecos feels like the opening of a major statement, the sound of a band widening its frame while keeping the knife sharp. If Eterno Retorno follows through on this promise, Diavol Strâin may have delivered an album that turns the song’s pressure into a prophecy.
Listen to 11 Ecos below and order the single here.
11 Ecos by Diavol Strâin Follow Diavol Strain:
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The post “In a Vile Delirium” — Chilean Darkwavers Diavol Strâin Unveil a Haunted Tableau With Video for “11 Ecos” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
