Montreal’s Douce Angoisse comes on like a bad idea dressed in couture: sleek, severe, and fully aware of the damage it might do. This independent French darkwave/coldwave project deals in raw, minimal pressure, where punk impulse meets cold electronic restraint across English, Spanish, and French. The result feels built for those late hours when desire, disgust, and dead-eyed detachment start wearing the same face.
The EP opens with Intro Xanax and Coffee, an instrumental that sets the table with real menace. It doesn’t waste time dressing the room. The track feels like fluorescent light on dirty tile, a synthetic crawl that prepares you for the damage to come, and it does so with enough tension to make even silence seem suspicious. From there, Can’t Get Away locks into the central trap of the whole record: the mind as a holding cell, the self as the one jailer who never clocks out. The beat keeps moving with bleak purpose while the atmosphere closes in, and that friction gives the song its sour charge.
Egoista carries a more poisonous kind of glamour. There’s vanity in it, with cracked lipstick and a cruel little grin, the kind that turns self-fixation into performance and performance into a slow emotional mugging. Repetition often works in the same mindset as obsession, and here that instinct lands hard. Dance to Death follows with a lurid, flesh-and-machine menace, pushing the EP deeper into its nocturnal descent. It’s the closest this release comes to pure seduction, though even then the seduction feels contaminated, like a kiss delivered with ulterior motives and perfect timing.
Xanax and Coffee takes the title’s miserable chemistry and runs with it beautifully. It sounds strung out, spiritually singed, and half in love with its own collapse, channeling the queasy push-pull between stimulation and sedation, between wanting oblivion and wanting one more hour before it arrives. Little Fucker, meanwhile, spits with a sharper tongue. It’s confrontational, bitter, and weirdly funny in the most poisoned sense, the kind of track that seems to enjoy drawing blood just to watch the expression on your face afterward.
Throughout the record, you can hear traces of classic artists like Front Line Assembly and Clock DVA, as well as contemporaries such as Lana Del Rabies, Rare DM, and Boy Harsher in the machinery, mood, and sense of erotic decay. It feels personal in the ugliest, strongest sense: raw, repetitive, and alive with psychic abrasion. These are dystopian dance tracks for people who know the party and the breakdown sometimes happen in the same room, under the same red bulb, with the same body keeping time through both.
Listen to Xanax and Coffee below and order the EP here.
Xanax and coffee by Douce Angoisse
Follow Douce Angoisse:
The post Montreal’s Douce Leans into Desire and Dead-Eyed Detachment With “Xanax and Coffee” EP appeared first on Post-Punk.com.