Haven’t slept in a thousand years
But I see you
I always see you
In my restless dreams
A Copy For Collapse’s The Line arrives after years of silence from Daniele Raguso, the Italian producer who has spent more than a decade dragging electroclash, EBM, synth-pop, and post-punk into the same strobbed basement and seeing which one comes out with lipstick on its teeth. Due March 2026 via Async Delay Records, the album ropes in Fivequestionmarks, Lady Maru, Elisa of Dear Company, Simona Pietrucci of Sorry Heels, Giovanni Santolla of The Spoiled, Milena Medu, Happy Skeleton, Kitty Willenbruch, and Caramel Chameleon, turning the record into a wired little séance table of voices, moods, and bad decisions.
The Line opens like a private warning scratched into concrete. Raguso builds the track around restraint, repetition, and that awful little border you draw around yourself when freedom starts looking too much like disappearance. It has the cold patience of early synth-pop filtered through post-punk self-interrogation, a song about escape that seems to know every exit leads deeper inside.
Faded takes the motivational poster off the wall, tears it in half, and lets the glue stick to its fingers. Simona Pietrucci’s words hover between endurance and collapse, while the music keeps nudging the body forward with a glazed, damaged tenderness. Desire is here, sure, but it has bags under its eyes and a bus to catch.
Sirens is where the record gets wet, feverish, and dangerous. The backing track recalls The Knife if they’d wandered into a Julee Cruise torch song at closing time, all moonlit menace and drowning-room glamour. Elisa of Dear Company sings as if desire were a tidepool full of glass, pulling romance, death-wish, and sleep into one slow marine spell.
2020 XXX turns lockdown lust into a sweatbox hallucination without pretending the pandemic was ennobling. Fivequestionmarks brings a horny, half-crazed energy that lands somewhere between Peaches and Gossip, with high-energy retro synth pressure and spooky atmospherics curling around the vocal’s bizarre little angles ala Vicious Pink and The Domanatrix. It’s funny, filthy, and lonely in the exact way 2020 made everyone weird.
Dark Planet comes on like a chrome-plated transmission from some club buried under an office block, with a spoken-word strut recalling Grace Jones and Die Krupps. The zippy laser hook gives it a cartoonish sting, but the menace stays real enough. It’s catchy in the way a warning siren becomes catchy after the third evacuation.
Heat is the album’s body count, its clenched jaw turned loose on the floor. The hypnotic bloops evoke minimal synth and electroclash, while the motorik beat keeps the track moving like a stolen car with bad brakes. Lust, rage, dancing, and psychic jailbreak all pile into the same overheated room.
Seance simplifies the drama to a minimalist rhythm, allowing Milena Medu to drift through the ruins. Boy Harsher meets Ladytron serve as ghostly reference points, particularly in the track’s detached delivery. The song’s true emotional power arises from regret reaching out for connection. Each line feels like a hand hesitating over a planchette, anxious for blame.
NCUPK feels woozy, warped, and strangely wired, in the most captivating way, filled with quirky bloops before erupting into chaos. The comparison to Neue Deutsche Welle and French Dark electronic acts like Malaria! and Hard Corps is fitting: it embodies the same vibe of club music twisted into a mischievous, crooked grin—playful yet wild. It resembles sentient machinery that’s developing a crush and making impulsive decisions.
Don’t Break Away is anxious electronica with a bruise under its eyeliner. Simona Pietrucci turns attachment into a trapdoor, singing from inside a state where love and self-sabotage keep exchanging coats. The track has drama without grandstanding, pain without politeness, and a rhythm section that keeps poking the wound just to see if it still answers.
The Last Warning is all blunt-force repetition and end-of-rope logic. Happy Skeleton’s words treat finality like a busted mantra, circling the need to stop until the phrase starts sounding less like a decision and more like a bodily reflex. The track works because it does not decorate exhaustion. It lets the dead end speak plainly.
Sleeper closes the record by crawling toward oblivion with a pillow over its face. Giovanni Santolla of The Spoiled gives the song its hollow-eyed ache, turning sleep into mercy and memory into a bad creditor banging at the door. It’s a bleak finish, but a fitting one: after all the heat, hunger, ghosts, and bodies, rest becomes the final forbidden luxury.
Listen to The Line below and order the album here.
The Line by A Copy For Collapse
Follow A Copy For Collapse:
The post “In My Restless Dreams” — A Copy For Collapse Returns With the Collaborative Synth Séance of “The Line” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
