Wide awake. Facing the remains
No one cares. It’s too late anyway
For decades, post-apocalyptic cinema has framed collapse as a cautionary spectacle: scorched cities, empty highways, a final reckoning rendered safely at a distance. But the older that imagery gets, the less it reads like science fiction, and the more it feels like a forecast we’ve been rehearsing in real time—resource by resource, decade by decade, decision by decision. The end of the world was once a genre. Now it’s a mood, a metric, and an inevitability we keep feeding.
With this in mind, French post-punk duo Buzzkill share “Wasteland”, the title track from their debut album WASTELAND, out now via Ganache Records and Cœur sur Toi. Formed in September 2024, the project pairs Nolwenn Boyet (lead vocals/synth) with bassist Ronni Gauderat, drawing on industrial, synth-punk, and cold wave traditions to shape a sound defined by saturated bass, nervous mechanical rhythms, icy synths, and a dense vocal presence. Their universe is cold, immersive, and intensely charged—designed to hold tension rather than resolve it.
“Wasteland” places its focus on the ecological and social consequences left to younger generations by decades of extraction, denial, and political inertia. The lyrics describe environments stripped of value and meaning, where resources have been exhausted and responsibility endlessly deferred by those in power. Awareness arrives not as revelation, but as confirmation: the damage is already visible, and appeals to faith, effort, or regret arrive too late to matter.
Rather than dramatizing disaster, the song documents its aftermath. Those who contributed to the collapse—through action, inaction, or privilege—are no longer insulated from its outcome. Prayer is reduced to habit, labor to futility, and belief to ritual without effect. The land itself becomes a record of that failure, transformed from shared resource into evidence and, ultimately, a site of consequence. In this framing, “Wasteland” is not about warning or prevention; it is about living inside what has already been lost.
Musically, Boyet and Gauderat reinforce this inevitability through discipline and pressure. Raw, brooding basslines grind forward with sustained insistence, locking into rigid tempos that feel industrial in both motion and intent. Crunchy snare hits, and mechanical rhythms drive the track with locomotive force, while synth lines rise and fall in cold, chiming arcs across the mix. Over it all, the vocal carries a haunting, ritualistic quality—almost a shamanistic lament in tone—suggesting fragments of belief carried over from an older world into one where faith no longer offers protection. The result is both brutal and contemplative, inviting movement even as it confronts the listener with ruin.
The accompanying video for “Wasteland” extends these themes through a first-person VR experience, placing the viewer directly inside the landscape the song describes. Rather than observing collapse from a distance, the camera adopts the perspective of someone moving through it—hands entering the frame, bodies assembling, structures looming, and fire erupting against vast, unforgiving terrain.
Gothic architecture, desert expanses, ritual imagery, and scorched horizons recur throughout the video, reinforcing the album’s post-apocalyptic framework. Figures gather around flames, silhouettes drift across open ground, and monumental ruins dominate the frame, suggesting a world shaped not by chaos but by consequence. The VR format collapses the boundary between witness and participant, mirroring the song’s insistence that no one remains outside the damage.
Watch the video for “Wasteland” below;
Buzzkill’s WASTELAND is out now via Ganache Records and Cœur sur Toi. Listen to the album below, and order it here.
Next Gigs:
Jan 17 — Le Dada / Toulouse
Jan 18 — Le Black Out / Montpellier
Mar 05 — Victoire 2 / Montpellier (with Pain Magazine)
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The post French Post-Punk Duo Buzzkill Wander the Post-Apocalyptic Aftermath in “Wasteland” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.