Violentene’s new EP, Victims Of Light, has the pale glamour of a city seen through a rain-streaked cab window at 2 a.m., all angles, reflections, and private wreckage dressed up for public display. The Ottawa synthpop duo knows how to hold a mood in place: across these five tracks, the duo sounds newly focused. The genre tags still hover nearby: synthpop, darkwave, retrowave, dreampop, synthwave, yet the record feels less concerned with scene allegiance than with emotional temperature.
Roland M. arranges the synth lines and drum programming with a sleek severity, as Mvrijo steps through the center of it all with a voice that carries cool distance and bruised longing in the same breath, giving these songs a soft, dangerous glow.
Savage City sets the tone with a sharp sense of modern alienation, full of pressure, suspicion, and the craving for something real in a world that keeps offering chrome substitutes. The hook has a sly persistence, and the production gives the track a taut frame that keeps its emotion from spilling over into melodrama. Other Side of Eternity goes deeper. The synths rise in long, gleaming waves, and Roland’s Moogs and Korgs lend the track a stately ache, as if some old cathedral had been rebuilt in glass and wired for electricity. Mvrijo’s performance carries the song with grave composure, turning its imagery of pain, peace, and passage into something felt rather than merely stated.
The title track is the EP’s finest argument for Violentene’s growth. Victims Of Light holds density and delicacy in an almost unnerving balance, letting the arrangement stretch and tighten with superb discipline. There’s a calm surface, although beneath that poise, you can feel all kinds of psychic wear and tear grinding away. Lyrically, the song is preoccupied with endurance, with sanity slipping by degrees, with survival becoming habit.
The two unreleased songs, Overcome and Beginnings, complete the EP by deepening the mood and broadening the emotional scope, showing that this release was sequenced with real thought rather than assembled for convenience or chronology.
“Creating these songs feels like a slow drift between beauty, tension, and emotional freefall,” says Mvrijo.
Roland adds, “We’re always stoked to get our music out to the world – in our heads the songs already exist in a space where beauty and collapse touch, but felt so inspiring to create!”
That tension between beauty and collapse is exactly where Victims Of Light lives, and Violentene handle it with rare poise. This EP feels cold to the touch, but there’s a live wire tingling under the skin.
Listen to Victims of Light below and order the EP here.
Victims Of Light by Violentene
Roland Marckwort launched Violentene in 2017 as a way to reconnect with the ambient and dream pop ideas he first explored in the late 1990s with Venus Swirls. That project later evolved into the electro outfit Liquified, which released two acclaimed CDs, earned significant chart success, and secured a deal with World Domination Records.
After a brief stint as a DJ, Roland went on to join the indie/new wave four-piece Politique, who released two albums, played many sold-out shows, and completed a Canadian mini-tour between 2008 and 2012. In 2017, he also collaborated with New York singer Dani Mari (Primitive Heart), producing and releasing the EPs Denial and Phantom Youth, both of which found a strong following within underground shoegaze and dream pop circles.
Mvrijo has been singing since her teens and has fronted several popular Canadian indie rock and pop acts. She and Roland connected in Ottawa in late 2019, united by a shared desire to finally bring the project to the stage and work together locally. They quickly began work on the Otherworld EP, and her arrival in Violentene proved to be the missing piece, helping bring the duo’s vision fully into focus.
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