Scimitar’s latest single, Razors, comes with the kind of bruised glamour that made the dark side of post-punk worth chasing in the first place – back when a band could look half in love with the dance floor and half ready to crawl out from beneath it. This LA trio has been mutating at a healthy clip since forming in the aftertaste of lockdown, first pulling themselves up from deathrock soil, then stretching toward something sleeker, stranger, and more fatalistic. You can hear traces of that old hunger still clinging to their frame, but here it gets dressed up in sharper lines, cleaner hooks, and a sense of emotional damage worn with perverse elegance.
Razors, the lead single from their debut LP Errare, due April 25th via Cigarettes & Alcohol Records, turns romantic ruin into a lonely procession for all eyes to see. This is the morning after the grand self-betrayal, the stagger home after the final argument has burned itself out, after whatever fragile pact held two people together has finally snapped in the middle. The song deals in severance: shared obligations turned into dead weight, devotion reduced to debris, the sick realization that what once felt permanent has become one more mess to drag behind you in daylight. Heartbreak blends with humiliation in this song, and that’s a far richer fuel. Heartbreak can still flatter the ego. Humiliation leaves you out on the curb with your collar turned up, trying to look composed while your spirit eats dirt.
Scimitar sets that feeling in motion. The track carries itself with a lean, disciplined chill that recalls Interpol’s metropolitan tension, while some of the abrasive physicality of A Place To Bury Strangers hangs around the edges like static on a bad line. There is also a body-moving undertow that brings Pelada to mind, that sense that despair ought to come with a beat severe enough to march to. The arrangement keeps tightening the screws without overplaying its hand. Synths drift in layered sheets, then the rhythm comes down with club-born purpose, turning private ruin into something communal enough to move inside.
Nestor Valenzuela’s video gives the song a handsome split screen of alienation. One thread places the band in the desert, staging a sword dance against a landscape that looks old enough to have seen entire civilizations rise and fail. Those scenes feel ceremonial, almost punitive. Then come the city sequences, all solitary movement and hollow distance, a figure walking through urban space with the posture of someone trying to survive being seen. Between those poles sits the performance setup, beautifully lit and suspended like some glowing borderland between exile and afterlife.
That in-between space is where Razors really lands. It lives in the cracked zone between regret and release, between posing and pain, between wanting one more chance and knowing better. Scimitar play it with style, but also with enough poison in the bloodstream to make the style matter.
Watch below:
Their upcoming album Errare has a central theme of moral judgment. “Errare,” literally “to err” in Latin, is inspired by the phrase “Errare Humanum Este” which translates to “to err is human.” The album asks, “Who among us is without sin? Who will cast the first stone?” Certainly stones are cast. The song’s themes throw blame at would-be lifelong lovers, shame the political elite, and guilt-trip consumerism while also making sure to melt into familiar comfort despite its wrongs. Only perfection can judge us but we’re still obligated to practice discernment.
Listen to Razors below:
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The post LA Post-Punk Trio Scimitar Turn Romantic Ruin Into Lonely Procession With Video for “Razors” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.