Wrené – Dark Matter (2022)
This album is everything you’ve come to expect of Wrené. Utterly avant-garde and religiously experimental, Wrené continues to push the boundaries of what makes a song. Surrealism and the usual unorthodox feel are rampant within these four songs and are written across various emotive stages of Wrené’s existence within social isolation. It’s heavy with an endless abyss of dark synths and manipulated strings being played at alternative tempos throughout this EP Dark Matter. It’s a stark reminder of the darkness and entrapment of true identity being the flesh and soul of the songs, the flesh and soul that Wrené undoubtedly personifies.
‘Hideous’ was born from traumatic life events and conveys those emotions tremendously. The voice is merely a tremble, with vibrato carrying notes up to the point of explosion, but just restraining itself in time. The lyrics portray a heroin-esque high where she “don’t wanna come down”. We hear the concept of being with someone who is dangerous and has an element of enchantment about them fairly regularly, but this rendition is played with sinister overtones, bubbling beats, and that same dark synth to create the perfect scene for our narrator being drawn in, soul and all. A moth to the flame, a junkie to the needle, the industrial beat cannot downplay the seduction the artist experiences and is inevitably caught (and trapped) by. The beat compliments the EP throughout, particularly in this track as when she says she can “feel myself floating”, the beat we had been privy to falls away leaving a vulnerable, minimalist acceptance of her true form.
‘White Walls’ is still distorted but this time with the vulnerability of the inevitable come down. It’s a very melancholic song with the synths creating an epic orchestral sound. It’s here that the artist acknowledges the fantasy the previous song led her in and understands that her human form in “translucent skin” is the great barricade to this alter ego. An image conjured up in my mind was of a schizophrenic realising that no one was ever there and it was just a transparent void inside these white walls. Sonically, the end of the song is a pulsating heartbeat, gaining speed with the snare and cymbals creating a cataclysmic build-up to a softly worded finish through a telephone filter. Like an MDMA-induced depression, from ‘Hideous’ with its highs to here with the comedown, a lull of sadness for our artist as wholeness is yet to be found.
‘Exile’ follows warped instrumentation with the same elongated vocals to stretch out Wrené’s message of acceptance of who she is. A loose scream is heard from Devlin Flynn (guitar, additional synth and backing vocals) panned between the beats after “it’s too late”. It’s a reminder that this alter ego is trapped and the acceptance of the present debilitation she finds herself in. Truly haunting!
‘Dark Matter’ is a wonderful summary for the EP. She re-emphasises her being lost in such a bitter blank, a hark back to the track ‘White Walls’. There is the promise of rebirth and change. The trajectory of the song really hammers home as the sensation of falling is magnified with the inspiration coming from a suicide attempt. It’s an emotional rollercoaster where the faint-hearted would have ejected after ‘Hideous’. Lucky for those that stayed on board, the song finishes with positivity. Life is, of course, the key here and the final accepting choice made.
Inspirations of Bjork and St Vincent sit throughout the EP, earnestly used with vigour, and abused with a refusal to follow the status quo of legends gone before. Wrené’s previous works of ‘Nude’ and ‘Unravel’ follow a slower, less synth-imbued style. Experimentation-filled, but in comparison to the entirety of this EP, it’s a completely different ball game. Again, it’s everything we’ve come to expect.
