2021
Devilish chanteuse crooning her dark, unsettling secrets into your trusting ears and twisting your tender heart, dark pop artist La Femme Pendu conjures her second full-length album, VAMPYR, forth from the midnight portals today.
Don your dark glasses and a single earring: VAMPYR is a 1980’s darkwave party and a celebration of shadows and lustful excess, produced by Grammy nominee Dave Darling and featuring guest appearances by Billy Morrisson, Jake Hays, Damien Done, and the magnificent punk legend Cherie Currie of the Runaways.
About this fête fantôme of an album and its moody revelries, the artist shares that after having been quarantined for more than a year, pale and thirsty for human connection, she felt “like Dracula emerging from putrid soil after his journey on the Demeter.”
As such, she continues, this record was an aspirational one, drawing inspiration from favorites across film and music: bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode. Films like The Hunger, Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Let the Right One In, and Only Lovers Left Alive.
The lyrical protagonists from her first full-length album, Absolute Horror were fallible and mortal. In VAMPYR, our narrators are empowered mistresses of the night. And after these many months (years now!) spent in the melancholic limbo and navel-gazing of our self-isolation, a wicked bit of carousing with La Femme Pendu’s vampiric bacchants is profoundly appreciated, even by this wallflower.
“It’s my dream soundtrack to a Halloween rager at a goth club, and these days a gathering like that seems just as dangerous as the bloody rave that opens Blade (1998). It’s no accident I made a record about a contagious undead condition after our collective endurance of this lethal virus.”
Songs that have got me fanged me up, pricked my imagination, and infected me thus far: the dreamy beat of “la somnambule” and the jaunty dread of “la nuit a un prix”.
Find La Femme Pendu: website // bandcamp // instagram
Images: Jackson Davis.