All I want is happiness
And to feel your lips on mine
Soft like a whisper
So beautiful and ugly
There’s a blunt honesty running through the new single Beautiful and Ugly that feels earned the hard way. Australia’s A Friend For Frank, after nearly three decades of bearing nerve as Thorts, consulted American artist calQtek with a plea. He needed a place to unload words he could no longer shoulder. calQtek meets him mid-spiral, and together they land on something raw, private, and stubbornly vital. Far from a casual collaboration, the project demanded a new name, a shared grammar, a space where damage could speak plainly…and 62 Dead Balloons blew into shape.
Beautiful and Ugly, from their upcoming album Where Shadows Find Their Grace (out this spring), distills that tension into a cold, minimal-synth electronic ballad built on buzzing, metallic beats and icy, economical electronics. Vintage-feeling synth lines hum with nervous propulsion, locking into clipped, mechanical rhythms that feel pixelated yet emotionally bruised. The voice carries most of the weight, circling masks, confusion, touch, and the wish for connection without romantic polish. Beauty and damage sit side by side, neither pretending to cancel the other. Stark and unadorned, the track recalls early minimal-synth and post-industrial pop—the kind of emotionally exposed machine music that would feel perfectly at home on a Stevo Pearce–curated Some Bizzare album, where vulnerability and severity, set against austere synth beats, helped usher in the dark synth-pop of the 1980s.
The accompanying video, shot DIY by Sage Somerville, illustrates that same ethic. Lo-fi DV textures, digital glitches, and a direct performance; nothing ornamental, nothing distracting. AFFF gravitates toward making visuals with his wife and son, trusting instinct, tripods, and whatever space is available. The result feels close, domestic, and unguarded, as if the song never left the room where it was written.
Watch below:
The name 62 Dead Balloons alone tells you how close to the edge this music lives. AFFF recalls the moment with unsettling clarity: “One day I worked out that I had smoked 62 cigarettes in one day and thought to myself, ‘my lungs must be like dead balloons.’”
For calQtek, it stretched further, into thoughts of mortality, self-sabotage, and the slow leak that comes from running from pain too long. Both artists arrive carrying wreckage. AFFF doesn’t soften it: “I was at rock bottom, alone and extremely traumatised.” Some songs written during that stretch were abandoned, too exposed to revisit. calQtek, wrestling addiction and burnout, channels his own collapse into the sessions. There’s no posturing here, no safety glass. The record grows out of necessity, not ambition.
Live performances are being carefully considered: AFFF is on the autism spectrum and the pressures of performing onstage can prove a challenge. “I really want to work on this in the future and start performing again,” he says. “I’m hoping I can start doing shows next year.”
At its core, 62 Dead Balloons runs on a shared belief that music still serves a purpose beyond release schedules and market logic. AFFF states it without flourish: “Without music life is meaningless.” He goes further, offering a credo that doubles as a warning: “Don’t be silent. Express yourself. Don’t be scared to show who you really are… ask for help when you need it. Life is too short, and we only have one shot at this. Don’t waste it. Live.”
calQtek frames the work as an ongoing discipline, a commitment to “self-reflect relentlessly and make every mistake beautiful.” Together, they describe the project as “genre fluid,” united less by form than by feeling.
Listen to Beautiful and Ugly below and order the single here.
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The post 62 Dead Balloons Channels Drama, Desire, and Dissonance in Video for Minimal Synth Ballad “Beautiful and Ugly” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
