In the cold of the night
In the dark of your life
You can dance or you can die
History hums in straight lines. A bassline. A drum pattern. A voice placed slightly forward in the mix, as if stepping out of a still-developing photograph. Undertheskin, the long-running project of Warsaw’s Mariusz [Void] Łuniewski, has spent a decade refining that hum into something disciplined and deliberate, music that feels engineered for late hours and lucid thoughts.
Now comes the third full-length: N E V E R | R E T U R N, released via Young & Cold Records. The album unfolds like a sequence of emotional coordinates: isolation, fracture, endurance, aftermath, each song separated by that vertical bar in the titles, a graphic scar. Across N E V E R | R E T U R N, Undertheskin maintains a strict economy. Massive basslines anchor the songs; vintage synths provide glacial sheen; drum machines mark the minutes with mechanical calm; guitars constrict rather than expand. Łuniewski’s voice remains the focal point: expressive, controlled, deeply invested in the emotional terrain it surveys.
Freezing | Lights opens with a bass motif that feels locked into repetition by design, moving with the austere elegance associated with Clan of Xymox and the early electronic drama of Ultravox. The lyrics probe permanence and certainty, circling the idea that what glows may also confine. Guitars close in, clipped and contained, while the vocal rides above with measured intensity. There is clarity in the coldness. End This | Summer shifts toward rupture. A friendship dissolves as seasons change; proximity gives way to absence. Echoed vocals widen the space between two once-aligned figures. The guitar lines stretch and recede, underscoring regret. Chords arc upward, echo gathering at their edges. Repetition here functions as memory replayed until meaning thins.
On the standout Dance | Die, motion is the argument and the answer. The beat draws in tight, urgent yet exact, every kick and synth line aligned with purpose. The lyric frames a clear ultimatum: surrender to the weight, or move through it. Here, the dancefloor becomes a survival zone, a place where the body bargains with despair and wins by staying in motion. Feeling runs high, but it is ordered, shaped, given form. You can hear the disciplined propulsion associated with Covenant in the rhythm’s forward drive — electronic devotion rendered in clean lines.
The black-and-white video, directed by Rytis Titas, extends that thesis into image. Gorgeously shot, it follows a woman alone at home as she prepares food with ritual precision. Her gestures are careful, almost ceremonial. She sits at the table as if in prayer, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the room. In her mind, another space opens: the darkened club, the press of bodies, the release of dancing without restraint. Domestic stillness gives way to imagined movement. What she longs for is simple and profound — companionship, connection, the shared pulse of presence.
Watch below:
Beyond the video, N E V E R | R E T U R N continues its careful sequencing. Dance | Die may crystallize the album’s thesis in motion, but it sits within a larger design — one where intimacy, rupture, and endurance are arranged with deliberate restraint.
Always | Never offers a gentler contour. Longing sits at the centre, shaped by a wish for someone else’s safety and return. Synth tones lift with restraint, almost luminous. Hope appears as a quiet constant, sustained by recollection rather than spectacle. With Exit | Wounds, the album confronts betrayal and mutual damage. The past is acknowledged, almost ritualistically. Harm is shared, not simplified. The arrangement remains disciplined, allowing the vocal to articulate loss without ornament.
The title track, Never | Return, pares everything back further. Wasted youth, emotional numbness, irreversible distance — these themes repeat like a mantra etched into the track’s backbone. The absence of flourish becomes its own statement. Time feels spent; the path once taken is now closed. There is a starkness here that again gestures toward Joy Division, though filtered through Undertheskin’s own contemporary minimalism.
Closing piece End This | Winter extends the seasonal metaphor into something harder, harsher. Words unsaid weigh heavily. Accusations linger. Yet within the insistence on ending lies a glimmer of forward motion; the possibility that a cycle can be named and then broken. There is an echo here of Pornography-era Cure in the emotional temperature, of Ultravox in the structural sweep.
Overall N E V E R | R E T U R N is a record that stands upright, pared back and purposeful, in the long conversation of post-punk’s modern mutations.
Order the album here
N E V E R | R E T U R N by Undertheskin
Founded in 2015, Undertheskin began as a solitary operation: Łuniewski writing, producing, performing, calibrating each element himself. Two albums, U N D E R T H E S K I N and N E G A T I V E, and the internationally embraced End This Summer EP positioned him as a figure within the modern coldwave continuum. Stages followed, shared with The Soft Moon, She Past Away, Clan of Xymox, Drab Majesty, and Lebanon Hanover.
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The post “You Can Dance or You Can Die” — Warsaw Post-Punk Project Undertheskin Releases Third LP “N E V E R | R E T U R N” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
