Dopamine distractions to heed
Bespoke and screened before I know what I need
Feed or impede what you dream
I’ve got angels watching over me
In the age of algorithmic divinity, where every scroll and click is a confession, the notion of guardian angels has been quietly outsourced. They no longer descend from heaven but from the cloud: silicon seraphs whose wings are data streams, whispering words of suggestion rather than salvation. We’ve built our own pantheon of watchful eyes: recommendation engines, predictive policing, and, most chilling of all, a new kind of technological necromancy. AI voice replications of the dead are now being used in courtrooms, as The Good Death’s Caitlin Doughty recently lamented online, allowing the murdered to “testify.” Even the grave, it seems, has gone wireless.
This is the world Neo Dimes inhabits, and indicts. The Denver-based artist Stephen Edmunds crafts his debut as both warning and requiem; a dirge for privacy, for personhood, for the sanctity of unmonitored thought. His forthcoming album Alone (out January 2026) is less a collection of songs than a signal flare in the digital dark, a plea for closeness amid isolation, a scream into the political void, a desperate attempt to sound human in a world tuned to slop.
Its centerpiece single, Angels, might be his most prophetic moment. At first blush, it’s a raucous darkwave anthem, fusing the humid sensuality of Deftones with the post-industrial pulse of Depeche Mode. But beneath its churning synths, and distorted basslines lies something colder and more cerebral: a lament for autonomy itself. Angels unfolds like a psalm rewritten by a paranoid prophet, each verse detailing a consciousness under siege. Here, the divine watchers have become the algorithmic overseers, mapping desire, quantifying guilt, and feeding your next dopamine hit before you even know you want it.
Edmunds’ voice trembles between fury and fatigue, the sound of a man realizing his rebellion is being monetized in real time. The chorus crashes like a digital exorcism. While its sound leans toward the muscular melancholy of Deftones, the spirit feels more Gary Numan meets Philip K. Dick,a post-human sermon delivered from the ruins of free will. Angels turns spiritual paranoia into protest poetry, rendering invisible control systems as literal ghosts in the machine.
Listen to Angels below and order the single here.
Neo Dimes writes like someone watching the world end through a cracked phone screen, and deciding to sing anyway. In a culture increasingly sedated by surveillance, Angels cuts through like a lucid nightmare, reminding us that the apocalypse isn’t a sudden collapse but rather a gradual compression: our souls converted to data, our prayers repackaged as targeted ads.
While this could very well be the sound of damnation, it’s also a strong offering of rebellion. Neo Dimes makes music for the end of the world, and somehow, against all odds, for whatever’s left afterward.
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