Rupaliparda.com | The Column

Grief, Ghosts and a Tapemachine: Junior Boys Return From the Dark Side

Darlings, pour yourself something strong, because this one arrives wrapped in static, shadow, and the kind of sorrow that only true artists know how to spin into gold.

Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus — the electronic alchemists we know and adore as Junior Boys — are back. And no, darlings, this is not a comeback dipped in glitter. This is something far more haunting. Their new album, The Gore, arrives on February 12, 2027 via City Slang, and from what I’m hearing, it is less a record and more a séance.

The lead single, “Underneath the Moon,” is being described as lysergic techno — and trust me, that is no marketing flourish. One listen and you’ll feel the walls breathing. The accompanying video, directed by the artist John Smith, is a love letter to TV static. Yes, that fuzzy grey snow your grandmother cursed at while waiting for the evening serial. Somebody finally made it art. Watch it below, but perhaps not alone at midnight.

Now, here is where the story gets deliciously deep. Greenspan, ever the cerebral one, has revealed in the press release that the single is “deeply inspired by the 2022 horror film Skinamarink.” And rather than simply borrowing the mood, he went the whole haunted hog — digging out an old Tascam tape machine and using vintage tape loop techniques to conjure the same eerie, decaying textures as the film. His words: an homage to “the ephemeral quality of analog recording tech.” Translation, dear readers: the machine itself becomes a ghost. I confess, I got chills just typing that.

But every great horror story has a heart, and here is the heartbreak beneath the hum. The Gore was written over several years in the wake of the deaths of Greenspan’s father and a close friend. Grief, then, is not the album’s theme — it is its blood.

And in a twist worthy of the column’s finest gossip pages, Greenspan calls The Gore a twin to its predecessor, Waiting Game — “a polarized articulation of the same thing, something about Silence, Serenity, Terror and Time, both circular and unending.” Two albums, one shadow, two faces. If that doesn’t make you want to listen to both back-to-back in a darkened room, my dears, check your pulse.

Now for the practicalities, because I do look after you. No tour dates yet — I know, I gasped too. But the band has lined up album playbacks early next year in Brooklyn, Seattle and Toronto, each beginning with a screening of the experimental film Wavelength and closing with a Q&A with Greenspan himself. An evening of experimental cinema, haunting electronics, and face time with the man behind the mystery? Book early, or spend 2027 in regret.

The Gore tracklist, for your diaries:

01 Funny How Time Slips Away · 02 Night Service · 03 The Tabernacle · 04 Hineni · 05 Underneath the Moon · 06 Holding Back Secrets · 07 Ligeia · 08 Kill Baby Kill · 09 Yizkor · 10 The Gore · 11 Randman Blues

Silence, serenity, terror and time. Until next time, keep your televisions humming.

— Rupaliparda