‘Cry,’ the latest single from Strange DNA, is part of an ongoing project to explore issues of identity and perception, self-discovery and new beginnings. Obviously very personal stuff, but like all music that digs into these territories, it still offers something relatable to anyone who prepares to listen properly. While personal issues of outsiderness, difference, and gender root the song in the artist, we also hear echoes of broader themes of vulnerability, disenchantment, confidence, and loneliness, things we can, sadly, all relate to.
And if the lyrics take us to some interesting places, the music is equally as searching, finding those liminal spaces where modern pop meets the spirit of older darkwave sounds, where shimmering musical beauty merges with stark sonic horrors, and where the innocence of the vocal treatment is drawn into electro-gothic stygian realms. Opposites attract, wolrds collide!
You would probably label ‘Cry’ as dark pop, but even that is such a broad category that it’s not very useful. Yes it is dark. Yes, it is pop. But there is also something neo-classical in the song’s sweep and scope, something dance-driven in its vibrant electronic beats, something dreamlike in some of its tones and textures, as if someone has flipped the dream pop coin and it has landed tails up, (fever-dream pop?) and something surprisingly euphoric, for all the troubled conversations that run through it.
Whatever you call it, it is music that asks some very poignant and pertainant questions. If music can do that whilst being entertaining, engaging and infectious, which this certainly is, then you are getting to the root of why we make music, or at least why people should make music, in the first place.
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