There’s a certain kind of New York record that feels like it came up under busted lighting and sharp instincts, the kind that understands the city as a mix of cut-rate epiphanies, failed love affairs, and someone dancing past their limit in a room with a leaking ceiling. Darling Black, aka Dylan Hundley, belongs to that tradition with a smart, dirty smile: her debut LP Darling Black carries the downtown clatter of post-punk, early electronica, electroclash, goth pulse, and industrial throb into something personal enough to feel lived in and loose enough to keep moving.
Hundley has already done time in the cultural trenches as the lead singer of Lulu Lewis, host of Radar on The Vinyl District, and curator of Salon Lulu, a roving New York art-and-music congregation haunting the Lower East Side. If her name sounds familiar, you must be a fan of cult favourite film Metropolitan. You can hear all of that traffic, and Hundley’s boundless creativity, in this delightfully strange, hypnotic record. It has the ears of somebody who has spent years around artists, weirdos, lifers, and glam casualties. As Darling Black, Dylan previously released the EP It Wasn’t Supposed To Be Like This in 2020 and several singles on the road to this album, and the full-length finally feels like the moment when all those impulses lock together and start throwing elbows.
8th and Alvarado is billed as urban dance punk, and that tag fits because the thing struts in wearing city dust and nightclub lipstick. It has that clipped, caffeinated forward motion that makes you want to spill your drink while pointing at the speakers. The Champagne remix by Youth opens it up for a bigger dancefloor without sanding off its bite, taking the original’s raw motor and giving it enough air to ricochet across a festival field. Same trouble, larger room.
Across the album, Hundley moves through goth, dance, electronic, industrial, minimal machine music, and full-on synthpop with the kind of appetite that suggests she likes records as events, not polite little mood parcels. The covers help tell the story: the John Cale penned/Bauhaus classic Rosegarden Funeral of Sores and Yoko Ono’s Walking On Thin Ice are not picked for prestige; they feel chosen because they belong to the same crooked family tree. Elsewhere, you can catch echoes of Kraftwerk, Polyrock, Ladytron, Fad Gadget, The Normal, and Talking Heads, especially in Dial, where rhythmic repetition gets worked like a nervous tic until it turns sexy.
The songs on Darling Black run through these spectrums and also offer a commentary on today’s world, and that range gets summed up best by Hundley herself: “I have always been drawn to the dynamic elements that live in the spectrums between joy and rage, light and dark, dancing and crying,” she says. “I enjoy exploring this range in my writing and as a performer. It is simply where my instincts take me. Not everything that is beautiful is all that, nor is all horror.”
That swing is the whole show, and it’s a hell of a ride.
Listen to Darling Black below and order the album here. Check out the Champagne remix by Youth here!
Darling Black by Darling Black
Darling Black will be heading to London and Berlin in April, making appearances with Youth and Lene Lovich. Catch her live!
April 17, 2026 — Christabel’s, London, UK (Hosted by Youth)
April 24–25, 2026 — Wild at Heart, Berlin, DE (Supporting Lene Lovich)
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The post NYC Brutalist Synthpop Artist Darling Black Releases Self Titled Album with “8th and Alvarado” Remix by Youth appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
