I try to find the time
To take this off my mind
Darkwave and post-punk built an international culture in the 1980s, when records made in modest studios traveled through independent shops, late-night radio, and crowded clubs, carrying the music far beyond the cities where it began. Four decades later, that momentum has returned: a new generation is filling theaters, crossing borders, and drawing the record industry’s attention once more. There is romance in seeing music, sustained by artists, promoters, DJs, and listeners, grow to such a scale through years of independent work. The signing of French Police—the Chicago trio whose bilingual songs turn romantic fixation into a disciplined form of dance music—to Interscope Records offers one of the clearest signs yet that the scene has recovered the power it held in the 1980s.
The announcement comes with Reptile/Japan, a double-single release and the band’s first offering for the label. For French Police, the agreement crowns an ascent built through independent releases, persistent touring, and an audience whose devotion has carried the group from Chicago’s South Side to packed rooms across North America, Europe, and Mexico.
Founded in 2018 by Mexican-American singer, lyricist, and guitarist Brian Flores, French Police includes lead guitarist Manny Herrera and bassist Rolando Donjuan. Their style, initially informed by Flores’ love of Interpol, echoes the somber romanticism of scene contemporaries such as Molchat Doma and Lebanon Hanover, while also linking to the lineage of classic post-punk bands like The Chameleons and KINO.
Reptile is a song built on a serpentine recurrence: a sensation enters the head, an effort is made to remove it, companionship is summoned as remedy, and each gesture circles back before relief can settle. This repetition gives the song the shape of a thought that has learned to pace in its psychological enclosure. Here, Flores speaks of a mind that appears both exhausted and dependent, caught between the wish for solitude from his invasive thoughts and the conviction that another person offers the only viable escape.
Within French Police’s familiar architecture of driving bass, measured guitars, close-set synthesizers, and taut rhythm, the words acquire a physical pressure to them. The emotional economy is severe, since the person being addressed has become the sole friend of the song’s trouble protagonist, and, therefore, his only apparent route to calm. Dependence lends the song tenderness and alarm in equal measure, with affection functioning as comfort, necessity, and possible trap.
The accompanying video, a Someoddpilot Studios production directed by Chris Eichenseer, places the band inside a visual field of overlays, doubled images, and unstable perspective. Performance footage is repeatedly multiplied and obscured, turning the musicians into figures seen through layers of damaged perception. The psychedelic effects operate through disorientation, with each superimposition pushing the performance further from stable reality. Faces slide across one another, space loses certainty, and the image seems unable to hold a single version of the present for very long.
Watch the video for Reptile below:
Japan redefines the language of intimacy, emphasizing care, travel, consistency, and romantic privilege. Its lyrics subtly express a condition: affection endures only if the other person behaves, belongs, and stays accessible. The promise’s tenderness is intertwined with a command. Japan treats another person as territory, where the line between need and ownership creates a core tension for the individual.
French Police have long understood how desire can carry menace without losing its elegance. In Japan, this instinct becomes especially keen, as expressions of care blend seamlessly into contractual language, with restrictive clauses masked as compliments. Possession is shown as generosity, obedience as romance, and dependence as evidence of devotion. Ultimately, the promises of always and anywhere seem less open and more confined.
A second Someoddpilot Studios visual directed by Eichenseer accompanies the release of Japan. Watch below:
Together, the songs provide an astute major-label introduction by presenting French Police at their most recognizable while broadening the psychological frame around the music. Both remain concise and immediate, yet each examines a different corruption of closeness: the first locates salvation in another person, while the second uses affection as leverage.
The Interscope signing will place the trio before a much larger audience, although French Police reach that threshold with an identity already formed through years of records, touring, and a particularly strong bond with listeners in Mexico. That history gives the signing its weight: the label is entering a story already well underway, attached to a band with a defined language and an audience that understands it.
Within darkwave, where cultural authority has usually moved upward from clubs and independent networks, the deal feels like a signal that the genre’s present generation can no longer be treated as a small annex of alternative music. “REPTILE / JAPAN” makes the case with economy. One song turns thought into confinement; the other turns love into jurisdiction. Together, they offer a dark, elegant, and intriguing beginning to French Police’s life on a major label.
Listen to Reptile / Japan here.
French Police 2026 North American Tour Dates (Get tickets here)
September 11 — Detroit, MI — El Club
September 12 — Toronto, ON — Mod Club
September 13 — Montreal, QC — Foufounes Électriques
September 14 — Boston, MA — Brighton Music Hall
September 17 — Brooklyn, NY — 99 Scott
September 18 — Philadelphia, PA — The Foundry
September 19 — Baltimore, MD — Baltimore Soundstage
September 21 — Charlotte, NC — Neighborhood Theatre
September 22 — Atlanta, GA — Terminal West
September 23 — Tampa, FL — The Orpheum
September 25 — Houston, TX — White Oak Music Hall
September 26 — San Antonio, TX — The Aztec Theatre
September 27 — Dallas, TX — Trees
September 29 — Albuquerque, NM — Sister
September 30 — El Paso, TX — Lowbrow Palace
October 1 — Phoenix, AZ — The Van Buren
October 2 — Las Vegas, NV — The Portal at AREA15
October 3 — Riverside, CA — Municipal Auditorium
October 4 — Anaheim, CA — House of Blues
October 7 — San Francisco, CA — August Hall
October 9 — Seattle, WA — The Crocodile
October 10 — Portland, OR — Wonder Ballroom
October 13 — Salt Lake City, UT — Metro Music Hall
October 15 — Denver, CO — Oriental Theater
October 17 — Nashville, TN — The Pinnacle*
October 18 — Chicago, IL — Ramova Theatre
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