DEATĦ B¥ LØVE sound like a band built out of distance, instinct, and obsession. The duo brings together Peter Guellard in Pittsburgh and Inga Habiba in Poland, but 444 does not feel like a remote collaboration stitched into shape after the fact. Released through Distortion Productions, it feels like two artists finding a shared language through atmosphere, pressure, and mood, then pushing that language until it becomes its own dark little world. Their music sits somewhere between electronic goth, industrial music, trip hop, and Middle Eastern influenced sound, but the stronger impression is less about genre than sensation. The album feels physical, cinematic, and strangely intimate, as if it is trying to make machinery breathe.
“Sellenno” opens the album with a cool mechanical pulse that immediately recalls Kraftwerk and KMFDM, though the track has a more romantic gothic undertow than either comparison fully explains. There is a trace of The Prodigy in the movement too, but DEATĦ B¥ LØVE are not chasing aggression for its own sake. The song is controlled, chilled, and pressurized at once. It has the feeling of something sleek and metallic moving through fog, with Habiba’s voice turning the electronics into something warmer, more wounded, and more human.
“Cosmic Power” is where the album fully locks into itself. The opening has a melodic, dreamlike pull, with shades of Middle Eastern and Balkan atmosphere moving through the track before the rhythm begins tightening around it. The pacing is gorgeous. Nothing feels rushed, and nothing feels underdeveloped. Habiba’s voice is especially strong here because she does not simply sit on top of the song. She seems to pull the whole thing inward. By the second half, the track becomes almost trance inducing, but its intensity does not come from getting bigger in an obvious way. It gathers pressure instead, and that pressure makes the song feel more seductive, more dangerous, and more emotionally consuming as it goes.
“In Unity” carries that same spellbound quality, opening with another beautifully shaped vocal and instrumental atmosphere before the electronics cut through. Habiba begins with some of her softest singing on the album, and that softness is exactly what makes the track feel so raw once it starts expanding. The song has a deep, ceremonial charge, almost like a soundtrack to a surreal scene where movement, colour, and danger are all happening at once. It is beautiful, but not pretty in a flat way. It feels strange, intense, and alive from the inside out.
“I Don’t” pulls the album into darker territory. The vocal treatment has a Portishead like shadow to it, but the song folds that mood into gothic rock and industrial electronics instead of leaving it in pure trip hop space. The background vocals are one of its best details, giving the track a ghostly depth that keeps creeping through the heavier structure. It is one of the clearest examples of how well the band can merge atmosphere and force without making either one feel secondary.
“Strong Inside” starts with a sharp electronic pulse before the drums and string like textures give it a more physical shape. The song feels more portal like than linear, as if it is opening into a different room rather than moving from verse to chorus in a predictable way. There is something intensely visual about it, with a purple, surrealist atmosphere that feels almost filmic. The sensuality of the track is not cheap or obvious. It comes from rawness, from the way the rhythm, vocals, and texture all seem to press against the body at once. It is one of the album’s most captivating pieces because it understands that darkness can feel intimate without becoming soft.
“God” shifts the centre of the album by bringing Guellard’s vocals forward. His voice gives the track a live Depeche Mode quality, and the song works as a change in perspective, but it is also one of the record’s less magnetic moments. The album loses some of its strange pull when Habiba is no longer the main force. Her background vocals help restore some of that atmosphere, and the song still has value as a darker, more grounded interruption in the record’s flow, but it does not carry the same charge as the surrounding tracks.
“Lost and Found” immediately brings the album back into more distinctive territory. The beginning is one of the strangest and most memorable moments on 444, with an electronic tone that almost brushes against old fantasy game music before the track twists into something more unstable. That shift is what makes it work. The song becomes arrhythmic in a way that feels intentional rather than messy, and Habiba’s vocals turn rougher and darker as the structure loosens. It sounds fractured, but the fracture feels like part of the point. The track lets disorientation become its own kind of movement.
“Temros (Symphonic Mix)” leans into a more romantic, villainous drama. It has a darker theatrical sweep, and while it does not cut as deeply as the strongest tracks here, it keeps the album’s ritual atmosphere intact. “Forest” is more restrained and repetitive, and it leaves less behind emotionally, but even the slighter tracks contribute to the sense that 444 is moving through different chambers of the same internal world.
“Ziro” is beautiful in a more immediate way. The duduk from Wojciech Lubertowicz gives the song a breathy, earthy presence, and Habiba’s vocals are stunning here. The track does not need to push as hard as “Cosmic Power” or “Strong Inside” because its strength is in the way it opens up. It is one of the album’s clearest moments of cultural and emotional texture, where the ancient and the electronic do not compete. They become part of the same pulse.
Then “Sellenno (Reprise)” closes the album by changing the emotional meaning of the opener. The first version of “Sellenno” has coolness, movement, and industrial beauty. The reprise strips that protection away. With spoken word from George Glashier, it feels less like a return and more like the album finally saying out loud what had been moving underneath it the whole time. The song’s connection to trauma, dissociation, memory, and survival makes the reprise hit with a different kind of force. It feels like a message going straight into the bloodstream, not because it is loud or dramatic, but because it slows the wound down enough for the listener to actually feel it.
That is where 444 becomes more than an impressive debut. DEATĦ B¥ LØVE are clearly fluent in the language of darkwave, industrial music, trip hop, and gothic atmosphere, but the album’s best moments are not impressive because of their references. They are impressive because the band understands implication. A rhythm can suggest danger without exploding. A voice can sound sensual because it is emotionally exposed, not because it is trying to perform seduction. A song can feel spiritual without becoming vague. 444 works because it keeps finding those charged spaces between beauty and threat, coolness and raw feeling, control and collapse.
The album is not perfectly even. “God” and “Forest” do not land with the same force as the surrounding tracks, and 444 is strongest when Habiba’s voice is allowed to become the emotional centre of the record. Still, those weaker points do not break the album’s spell. At its best, 444 feels ancient and futuristic at the same time, as if gothic industrial music has been pulled through memory, distance, ritual, and damage until it comes out bruised, sensual, and completely awake. For a debut, that is more than promising. It is already a world.
444 is out now on CD and digitally via Distortion Productions.
Credits:
Music by Inga Habiba and Peter Guellard.
Lyrics by Inga Habiba and Peter Guellard on “God”.
Inga Habiba: vocals and keyboards.
Peter Guellard: guitars, DAW, bass, upright bass, and vocals.
Wojciech Lubertowicz: duduk on “Ziro”.
Tomasz “Mechu” Wojciechowski: guitar on “Strong Inside”.
George Glashier: spoken word on “Sellenno (Reprise)”.
Produced by Peter Guellard.
Recorded at Psychotribe in Pittsburgh, PA and Toya in Lodz, Poland.
Mastered by Garrett Haines at Treelady Studio in Pittsburgh, PA.
Cover art designed by Grindhouse Alternative Art Studio.
“Cosmic Power” and other videos directed and produced by Peter Guellard.
Publicity by Shameless Promotion PR.
DEATĦ B¥ LØVE online:
Website
Bandcamp
Facebook
Instagram
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Music
