Mareux makes dance come-ons for goths who love V103

Mareux Credit: Lance Williams Disorientation is the heart of Mareux’s dark electro-pop songs. Mareux, aka Los Angeles artist Aryan Ashtiani, sings about the kind of love that knocks you upside the head, so why shouldn’t his music set your skull spinning too? Ashtiani’s skeletal postpunk guitars cut through the air like a falling bucketful of ice water, and his electronic percussion evokes 1980s European dance music as it drives ahead coldly and implacably. He sometimes sings in a half-mumbled groan or adds enough distortion to his voice that it sounds like he’s auditioning for Daft Punk. On last year’s Nonstop Romance (Revolution), he buries his songs in hazy synth atmospheres redolent of the endearing but puzzling 2010s musical phenomenon known as witch house. Here and there, the album sounds like something that scene lightning rods Salem might’ve made to score Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.

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