North Innsbruck – Archduke Of Nightmares

Dirty synths meet suicidal lyrics

I can clearly hear dark wave roots here, but North Innsbruck doesn't leave it at nos­tal­gic mel­an­choly. Underneath every single note is a dark synthe pop sound that imme­di­ately grabs me with its won­der­fully ana­logue-sound­ing and delight­fully dirty synth sounds. It's one of those pro­duc­tions where I keep dis­cov­er­ing new, inter­est­ing sounds and unex­pec­ted interruptions.

I'm par­tic­u­larly taken with the bridge: with its fast, bright-sound­ing melod­ies, it strikes me as an excit­ing chase through night-time alleys. The lyr­ics are dark; lines like "Weakness con­sumes a stray­ing mind" under­line the oppress­ive atmo­sphere of the track. Greg Online deliv­ers vocals that remind me of the early era of The Cure, even if the massive sound of the song some­times takes up so much space that the vocals are almost a little too short for my taste. There is a risk of los­ing the thread of the con­tent in the over­whelm­ing power of the sound, but that doesn't change the fact that this pro­duc­tion is in a league of its own in terms of crafts­man­ship. If you're into multi-layered, emo­tion­al depth, you can't ignore this ‘Archduke’.

Listen to "North Innsbruck – Archduke Of Nightmares" on Bandcamp

Lyrics of "North Innsbruck – Archduke Of Nightmares"

In anoth­er way
Weakness con­sumes a stray­ing mind
Well I remain

Will a mil­lion lives
Take part in your suicide
And why
Will I remain or remind you?

You have no answers
Ordinary think­ing can't be right
Cause you're the man to know

In the morning
When you wake up from your lie
Dying all alone