Zabus plunges into existential voids with their latest video, Grafhýsi Fyrir Alla, a bleak visual meditation complementing their recent EP, Shadow Genesis. Continuing an intense period of creative activity, coming hot on the heels of their acclaimed full-lengths Automatic Writhing and Floodplain Canticles, the DC-based avant-garde post-punk projact offers a stark reflection on beauty’s destructive demands and existential futility.
Directed with unsettling precision, the video unfolds in monochromatic austerity, capturing ghostly figures entrapped in perpetual rituals of vanity. Each frame brims with anxiety, the imagery oscillating between embalmed stillness and disquieting motion…blurred faces distorted by reflection, clips from films, uncanny-valley thousand-yard stares, and bodies trembling under unseen burdens. Zabus provides an unflinching look at the psychological decay beneath society’s polished veneer.
Jeremy Moore’s vocals inhabit this spectral arena, pleading through droning guitars and ambient waves of synth. The track weaves maternal metaphors into death-driven compulsions, rendering beauty standards as spectral tormentors. Each lyric feels both incantatory and accusatory, highlighting the crushing desperation in clinging to ephemeral ideals. Distorted guitars fracture like glass underfoot, while minimal percussion and ambient noise swell into a dense atmosphere of anxious despair.
Influences from Velvet Underground’s raw experimentalism, Spacemen 3’s meditative drone, and Joy Division’s bleak post-punk ethos are reimagined through Zabus’ singular lens. The sparse instrumentation strips the song to its bones, amplifying the existential dread of cyclical existence: birth bleeding into death, memory devoured by amnesia. It’s a musical exorcism of preconceived artistic identities, raw and immediate, executed with improvisational clarity.
Grafhýsi Fyrir Alla (Icelandic for “mausoleum for all”) compels us to reckon with the stark consequences of chasing hollow ideals, leaving no room for comfort or illusion. Zabus pierces the veil between life and death, perfection and decay, with fearless introspection, transforming existential despair into vital, visceral art.
Watch the video below:
Listen to Grafhýsi Fyrir Alla below and order the single here.
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