A lament begins where ordinary speech reaches its limit. Across Irish and Scottish Gaelic traditions, keening gave bereavement a communal voice, allowing grief to rise through repeated cries, elongated vowels, and melodies that seemed to carry private anguish beyond the body. The old songs associated with death and departure seldom treated sorrow as an interruption to life. Loss belonged to the order of existence, and music provided the vessel through which the living could address the dead, the absent, and whatever might wait beyond sight.
Medieval mourning followed a similar impulse. The planctus, sung for fallen rulers, saints, biblical figures, and loved ones, placed grief inside solemn melodic forms whose restraint often intensified the pain they carried. Processions, bells, candles, veils, and liturgical voices gave sorrow a physical setting, surrounding the bereaved with symbols when language had become inadequate. Centuries later, synthesizers can occupy the place once held by the drone, organ, and tolling bell, while the human voice still performs its oldest work: calling into the silence left by another person.
TVAM and Los Angeles synth-pop artist Riki enter that ancient territory with The Sorrow, their new collaboration released through TVAM’s Psychic Data label. Created remotely between Manchester and Los Angeles, the song turns love and loss into an ethereal goth dirge steeped in dark magic, medieval folklore, ecclesiastical grandeur, and the terrible intimacy of heartbreak and bereavement.
Low, sustained synthesizers open the recording with the sensation of fog rolling through a churchyard, slowly revealing a deep, buzzing organ tone beneath them. Delicate notes follow, somewhere between a kalimba and vibraphone, their chiming quality lending the arrangement an antique, almost ceremonial character. A broad sweep of synthesizers then rises with the severe beauty associated with Dead Can Dance, while the revolving drumbeat gives the piece the measured pace of a funeral procession.
Riki sings in a medieval, liturgical register, stretching her voice into phrases whose words remain difficult to distinguish while their meaning feels unmistakable. Her performance moves beyond conventional synth-pop phrasing into something closer to invocation, with each ascending line carrying another measure of anguish. Voice, percussion, organ, and chiming motifs pass over the senses in successive waves, layering sorrow like lace across a mourner’s veil. The Sorrow may be the deepest either artist has ventured into ethereal goth, and their shared instincts make the descent feel entirely natural.
TVAM’s Joe Oxley remembers the moment the collaboration found its form:
“It’s rare to find those moments when two artists can connect on something and it just seems to fall into place. It happened as soon as I dropped Riki’s vocal into the mix and the piece came alive.”
The accompanying visualizer places the song inside the unstable glow of an aging television. Distorted monochrome faces, veiled figures, clasped hands, stone reliefs, and indistinct landscapes appear through scan lines and buckling interference, as though fragments of a damaged medieval archive were being transmitted from an abandoned chapel. Pale blue-grey images occasionally give way to bruised reds, while figures stretch, double, and dissolve beneath rolling bands of static. The imagery functions as a distressed electronic reliquary, holding traces of devotion and death that seem perpetually on the verge of disappearing.
Watch the visualizer for The Sorrow below:
Liverpool dark electronic outfit Those Holy, who joined TVAM during the Ruins tour earlier this year, push the song into an even more severe form on the B-side remix. Oxley recalls:
“They played with us on the Ruins tour earlier in the year a just blew me away. They’ve got their own sound, really dark and intense but with these fragile moments which mess with your head.”
Those Holy
For TVAM, The Sorrow follows Ruins, his third full-length album and the successor to 2022’s High Art Lite. Released through Invada Records in February, Ruins was shaped by grief, reflection, and personal transformation, with songs including Powder Blue, In Memory, and The Haunted examining what remains after loss has altered the dimensions of daily life. That preoccupation leads directly into The Sorrow, where mourning assumes a more mythic and devotional scale.
Joe Oxley of TVAM
Riki’s recent work has found her moving between solo material and carefully chosen collaborations. In March 2025, she released the two-song Pulser single, pairing its title track with Devil Games. Two months later, she joined Mareux for Ébène Fumé, a romantic duet featured on his album Nonstop Romance. Her work with TVAM draws out another dimension of her voice, replacing the poised movement of her Italo and new-wave material with the grave sweep of sacred song.
Riki
TVAM first gained wider attention with his 2018 debut album, Psychic Data, recorded in a small bedroom studio in Wigan. From the slogans of Porsche Majeure to the political unease of Semantics, Joe Oxley developed a body of work concerned with media saturation, cultural memory, and the images through which modern life understands itself. His music has since received daytime support from BBC Radio 6 Music and appeared in television productions including Succession.
Riki established her solo identity with 2020’s self-titled debut before widening her emotional and stylistic reach on 2021’s Gold, both released through Dais Records. Her combination of European new wave, Italo disco, art-pop, and dramatic stage performance has always carried a strong visual sensibility. On The Sorrow, that theatrical command becomes almost ecclesiastical, suited to a song that regards heartbreak through the distance of centuries.
The Sorrow was composed by TVAM and Riki, mixed by Joseph M. A. Oxley, and mastered by Dean Honer of I Monster and The Moonlandingz. The release is available digitally through the DSP smartlink and as a hand-numbered, two-track “Blood is Thicker” cassette limited to 100 copies.
Copies numbered 1 through 25 are available exclusively in a limited bundle containing the cassette and a The Sorrow T-shirt. The remaining hand-numbered copies, 26 through 100, are offered separately. The cassette places the original collaboration on the A-side and the Those Holy remix on the B-side.
Listen to The Sorrow and the Those Holy remix below or via the streaming service of your choice, and order the limited-edition cassette or T-shirt bundle here.
The Sorrow by TVAM, Riki, Those Holy
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The post TVAM and Riki Invoke Ancient Magic, Heartbreak, and Timeless Love in Ethereal Goth Dirge “The Sorrow” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.