Every spectacle contains a private bargain with disaster. Fireworks make that bargain visible: powder and metal are prepared for beauty, ignited at close range, and trusted to travel in the promised direction. When the trajectory fails, celebration becomes panic before the eye can separate pleasure from fear. A relationship ruled by manipulation follows a similar course. Possession borrows the language of protection, dependency passes for devotion, and the danger becomes obvious only after the fuse has already burned its way down.
Australian witch house and dream pop duo dusk2dawn place that collision at the center of It Kills Me Every Time. The downtempo lament is the second single from their debut album, Make A Wish, due September 11, 2026, through DERO Arcade. It follows Psalm 23, the record’s first official single, released in July.
The recording opens in a distant hum that could be a roadway heard through concrete, then sinks into a deeper metallic drone. Synthesizers spread outward in broad, gauzy layers, carrying something of Blade Runner’s nocturnal grandeur through the haze of shoegaze and dreampop. A slow, shuffling drumbeat gives the track its narcotized gait. Jack Mannix sings with a dull, depleted sorrow, his voice seemingly drawn from a heart where hope has been reduced to residue. Finn Parker keeps widening the arrangement behind him, laying sheet after sheet of synth across the rhythm until the music reaches the desolate scale of The Cure’s slowest pieces on Disintegration and Wish.
Written around manipulation, betrayal, boredom, possession, and dependency, It Kills Me Every Time dwells inside an attachment where harm has repeated so often that it begins to feel like the governing law. The measured tempo gives every phrase room to sink in, while the massed keyboards turn sorrow into something physical, pressing against the vocal from all sides.
The accompanying video extends that condition into a catalogue of amateur fireworks disasters. Grainy found footage shows driveways, parking lots, wet plazas, and crowded public displays briefly transformed by fountains and rockets that veer sideways, topple, or burst at ground level. People scatter as white flashes burn out the camera sensor; cars and houses disappear behind red smoke; one doomed attempt gives way to another. Edited by Parker from clips sourced by Mannix, the film finds a grimly apt image for the song’s damaged intimacy: people remain close to something designed to explode because they still want the promised beauty.
“We often work with found footage for our videos, previously we have used footage of an exotic dancer in a masonic lodge, or a montage of controlled building demolitions. I like the way that these visuals provide an emotional metaphor for the music and create a somewhat hypnotic and disturbing viewing experience, with the aesthetics of lost media and youtube rabbit holes. For this video the firework accident footage seemed fitting as it was this document of people creating these dangerous and beautiful displays of explosives, and an attempt at one thing that goes wrong and creates another. The lengths and risks people will endure for a spectacle”
Watch the video for It Kills Me Every Time below:
dusk2dawn brings Finn Parker of Eternal Dust together with Jack Mannix of Circle Pit. The two first met as teenagers within Sydney’s post-punk scene and briefly played in a band alongside future members of Low Life and Exek. Parker began dusk2dawn as a solo outlet for the witch house- and gabber-informed instrumentals he was making while active in Eternal Dust, inviting Mannix to join as vocalist and lyricist in late 2022. Early demos followed during a brief period when they shared an apartment in Kings Cross and were released through Mannix’s DERO Arcade. A handful of sold-out appearances in Sydney and Melbourne accompanied the pair’s work on what would become Make A Wish.
Across the album, dusk2dawn move from the punk and industrial pressure of opening track Angel Face into dream pop and witch house ballads such as soul2keep, Heaven Is Only In Hell, and Gateway. Psalm 23, the title track, and Behind The Mask draw the record toward darker gothic forms. Its subjects remain equally severe, moving among suffering, grief, sublimation, transcendence, decay, mutation, and possession.
Of his approach to the lyrics, Mannix says:
“I try to make my lyrics for this project as obtuse and simple as possible, to create a screen that the listener can easily project their own experiences and interpretations onto. I want to cast a spell that is at once loaded and universal – the real meaning buried in the simplest possible terms.”
Make A Wish was recorded and mixed by Finn Parker and Eduardo Bianchino, then mastered by Wayne Sunderland at Suture Mastering. The album arrives September 11 through DERO Arcade.
Listen to It Kills Me Every Time below and pre-order the album here.
Revisit Psalm 23, the first official single from Make A Wish, below:
Watch the duo’s earlier videos below:
soul2keep:
Heaven Is Only In Hell:
Follow dusk2dawn:
The post When the Fireworks Fail — Australian Dream Pop Duo dusk2dawn Light the Fuse in Video for “It Kills Me Every Time” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
