“Cold fear making you feel inside” is an odd line to dance to, which is precisely why it suits Scary Nights, the new single from Dream Council, the Berlin-based project of Sean Michael Pheanis. The song belongs to that useful strain of synth-pop in which pleasure and unease share the same room, each sharpening the other. Its hook is immediate, its beat clipped and insistent, and its synths carry the lacquered cool of an 80s television performance viewed at midnight with the volume turned higher than wisdom recommends.
Pheanis has been moving toward this music for years. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, he began in DIY punk, putting out friends’ recordings through a homemade label before a MicroKORG and the records of Adult., The Faint, and Fischerspooner redirected his attention. Bachelor Party Weekend followed, mixing dance-punk with an eccentric new-wave bounce, after which New York and the early Bushwick witch-house scene supplied another vocabulary. Later came Los Angeles, where the city’s darkwave community helped Dream Council settle into a clearer identity, and then Berlin, where Pheanis completed the project’s self-titled debut LP.
That history can be heard in Scary Nights, though the song carries its references lightly. There is something of The Human League, LCD Soundsystem, and even a little Thompson Twins in its vocals and catchy melodics, while the sterner club architecture recalls modern contemporaries Buzz Kull, Kontravoid, and Blone Noble. Synth-pop works best when the machinery serves a memorable tune. The chorus has the tidy inevitability of a phrase one seems to know before hearing it, and the arrangement keeps finding small ways to increase the pressure around it. This song is catchy as hell.
The accompanying video extends that sense of private unease. Pheanis appears alone in a club after closing time, moving in slow motion through a space built for crowds, flirtation, and communal release. With nobody left to watch, the dance becomes stranger and more personal. Empty floors and dormant lights turn the nightclub into a temporary kingdom for one, a place where fear can be indulged, stylized, and perhaps exhausted before morning. The conceit also gives the song a sly visual joke: dance music has finally secured the dance floor it always wanted, only to discover that absolute freedom can look suspiciously close to isolation.
Watch the video for Scary Nights below:
There is an appealing continuity between the song and Pheanis’s long sequence of relocations. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin each contributed something to Dream Council, and “Scary Nights” gathers those years into a remarkably assured piece of pop writing. Mixed by California engineer Frank Royal and due on the forthcoming self-titled album through Lollipop Records, it suggests an artist who has finally found the right room for all the music he has been carrying around.
Listen to Scary Nights below and order the single here.
Scary Nights EP by Dream Council
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