Where’s the joy in this all?
Where’s the light in the dark
My hands hide my tears, I feel so lost
This first day of Fall
Summer does not end so much as loosen its grip. The green world, having spent itself extravagantly, begins to remember that fullness and disappearance are partners. Leaves turn because life is not obliged to remain at its brightest. The air cools, light lowers, and what seemed permanent reveals itself as a passing arrangement. Autumn teaches without speaking: beauty depends upon change, and change upon loss. Yet nothing is truly lost; forms simply withdraw into other forms. The falling leaf is not a failure of the tree, but part of its rhythm. So too, perhaps, are we, within nature’s larger turning. Despair can still dance.
Since forming in Los Angeles in 2021, DECEITS (Kevin Moreno and Francisco Saenz) have dragged the music back toward blood, romance, and movement, pulling from the Spanish-language records that surrounded them growing up and letting those rhythms rub against basslines built for dark rooms.
The First Day Of Fall comes from a worse place. Moreno wrote it the day before his birthday, during a morning when the approaching occasion felt less like celebration than accusation. Birthdays carry the ridiculous expectation that happiness should report for duty on schedule, and the song turns that pressure inside out. Here is somebody staring at another year of existence and wondering whether disappearance might be easier. When Moreno sings, “I dream to be forgot,” the line lands with the ugly simplicity of a thought you wish you had never admitted to yourself.
The music, meanwhile, moves with enough force to keep despair from becoming static. Bass sits at the center with a cold, muscular authority, pushing against a hard drum pattern while guitars spread reverb across the track in broad, abrasive sheets. Gothic synthesizers hang behind the rhythm section, giving the song a sense of scale without smothering its punk impulse. There is a useful contradiction in hearing music this alive carrying words preoccupied with erasure, as though the body has decided to keep moving even while the mind is filing objections.
Moreno’s voice makes that conflict sharper. In the quieter passages he bends into a soft, almost romantic delivery, letting the words hover close to the ear before climbing toward a piercing upper register when the arrangement surges. The shift feels less theatrical than involuntary, like restraint finally losing the argument.
The production owes an obvious debt to the cavernous records of the 1980s gothic underground, though the mix has enough present-day weight to keep the references from turning archival. Reverb creates depth around the guitars and vocals, but the bass and drums remain immediate, physical, and slightly dangerous. Every element seems placed to preserve tension rather than polish it away.
Listen to The First Day of Fall below:
The First Day of Fall turns a private crisis into forward motion, carrying self-erasure, birthday dread, and the changing season inside a rhythm section that keeps pressing ahead. With the Hurt As Much As Me Tour 2026 on the horizon, DECEITS sound ready to take that contradiction straight into the room, where pain becomes volume and motion becomes temporary proof of life. Maybe that is DECEITS’ gift: making anguish feel communal without sanding down its teeth.
Listen to The First Day of Fall below and order the single here.
The First Day Of Fall by DECEITS
Hurt As Much As Me Tour dates (Get your tickets here!)
Sep 24 Omaha, NE- Slowdown .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Sep 26 Davenport, IA- Raccoon Motel .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Sep 27 Chicago, IL- Sleeping Village .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Sep 28 Detroit, MI- Smalls .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Sep 30 Boston, MA- The Rockwell .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 1 Troy, NY- No Fun .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 3 Philadelphia, PA- The Grape .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 4 Brooklyn, NY- Woodshop .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 5 Washington, DC- Pearl Street Warehouse .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 6 Durham, NC- Stanczyks .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 7 Charlotte, NC- Snug Harbor .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 8 Atlanta, GA- Purgatory .𖥔 ݁ ˖
Oct 10 Ft. Lauderdale, FL- Revolution Live ☾
Oct 11 Orlando, FL- Will’s Pub ☾
Oct 28 Hollywood, CA- The Roxy
Nov 14 Huntington Beach, CA- Darker Waves
.𖥔 ݁ ˖ With Computer Kill. ☾ With Haunt Me
The band also has a full US + Australia headline run coming up this fall
Australia:
November 27 – Auckland, AUS @ Whammy Bar
November 28 -Christchurch, AUS @ Space Academy
November 29 – Wellington, AUS @ Valhalla
December 4 – Newtown, AUS @ The Vanguard
December 5 – Collingwood Vic, AUS @ The Tote
Follow DECEITS:
Instagram
YouTube
Spotify
Bandcamp
TikTok
The post Where’s the Light in the Dark? — Los Angeles Romantic Post-Punk Duo Deceits Share “The First Day Of Fall” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
