Moon in her eyes
Darker than her mourning lace
Powers my addictions
Power keeps me in my place
AVRO’s psychopathé arrives on the scene with the chill assurance of infrastructure rather than event: a late train, brakes sighing, steel ticking as it cools, no ceremony beyond the fact of its arrival…and yet it is a banger from start to finish. Adam “Atom” Percy has reduced the Vancouver Island project to a solo operation, and the record bears the marks of that paring back.
What unfolds is a study of celebrity as superficial posturing. Fame appears as a learned behaviour: how to stand, how to be seen, how to keep one’s distance intact while remaining legible. Each track adopts a different vantage point: the watcher, the watched, the self-aware participant rehearsing sincerity as technique. These voices drift past one another without collision, sharing air but not language. Percy observes them with a level gaze, refusing moral punctuation. The discomfort comes from recognition rather than critique.
From the outset, the album constructs an interior weather system. Opening instrumental Commencement, with its eerie synth pads, spoken-word samples, and plodding minor chord, functions less as an overture than as customs control, a place where you hand over your pockets before being allowed through. Its restraint feels ideological.
In Insomniac, a sleepless admirer studies an aloof figure moving through club hierarchies with practiced confidence. Desire curdles into fixation and resentment as condescension replaces intimacy. The speaker circles the sealed interior of another’s world, awake, pleading, excluded, caught between longing for recognition and the quiet humiliation of being unseen. The synths and Percy’s crooning vocals here channel a bit of Talk Talk and a bit of Bryan Ferry.
Sleeping World stages its unease within the familiar circuitry of nightlife. Bodies move, lights fracture, glances trade value. Yet the song’s tension is internal, lodged in the frustration of proximity without access. The speaker remains awake at the edge of another’s sealed interior, aware not only of desire but of rank, of style as social armor. The club becomes a micro-economy of attention and exclusion, and Percy charts its transactions with cool efficiency.
Blue Light, Hot Dreams recalibrates the album’s temperature. Screens replace faces; reaction substitutes for connection. Dissatisfaction becomes propulsion. There is an agreement here—unspoken but binding—to keep everything in motion before it acquires weight. Desire sustains itself through friction alone. Percy’s voice stays close, almost conversational, as though excess would risk sentimentality, and sentimentality would break the spell.
In the seductive Psychopathé, the production privileges definition over density. Synth figures arrive clean – almost romantic – assert their presence, then withdraw. Rhythms step forward with purpose and step back again. Nothing competes for dominance. This economy sharpens perception: a pause that lingers just beyond comfort, a melodic turn that suggests fixation rather than release, repetition used as compulsion rather than seduction.
Perfect World tightens the frame further, examining a relationship structured by imbalance. Affection circulates alongside apology; indulgence masquerades as care. Devotion becomes a practiced dependency. The promise of an ideal future surfaces briefly, only to dissolve into something transactional, costumed, finite. Percy resists dramatization. The collapse is treated as procedural, which only heightens its sting. Vocally, there’s a cool authority here, recalling a certain early-’80s British detachment where intimacy was delivered with immaculate distance. We hear a lot of parallels to Heaven 17, Depeche Mode, The Human League, and John Foxx.
Liars in Love, which really channels the sultriness of Japan, introduces velocity. Alcohol, movement, mutual misdirection coalesce into a temporary contract. Exhilaration thrives precisely because honesty has been suspended. The track moves fast, aware that stillness would expose too much. There’s a slyness in the arrangement—a funky backbeat, soft-focus pads, that hints at pleasure without innocence.
Listen to Psychopathé below and order the album here. Out now via Warranty:Void Records.
Throughout the album, Percy demonstrates an acute sensitivity to how desire entangles itself with performance. Celebrity culture is not diagnosed so much as documented, as if observed from the wings while gestures repeat themselves under different lights. Glamour carries a low-grade menace; admiration slides toward control with barely a change in temperature. A European cinematic distance hangs over the record, granting the listener enough remove to observe, never enough to feel absolved.
Psychopathé concludes without resolution. There is no closing argument, no moral accounting. It ends the way nights end: by dispersal. Percy leaves us with the sense that these dynamics will reappear elsewhere, under other names, other lights, other assurances. AVRO offers something quietly unsettling: a record attuned to how modern desire learns its manners, perfects its poses, and sharpens its teeth while keeping its voice low.
Avro’s history hums beneath the surface. Since 2016’s Anatomy Act EP and the duo album Futuretroactivism in 2022, Percy has blended synth-pop elegance with the introspective chill of cold wave. The new work distills these influences into something sleeker, more fevered; a mirror polished by solitude.
Touring across Canada and remixing for Bif Naked, Avro has kept the flame alive through festivals and late nights in studio exile. With the Psychopathé EP arriving January 16, 2026, Percy stands poised between decadence and discipline. In his world, fantasy is both the narcotic and the cure. The music asks for nothing but belief…and perhaps a final dance beneath the velvet curtain.
Follow Avro:
The post It’s Only Fantasy — Vancouver Island Artist AVRO Conjures Synthpop Alchemy with “Psychopathé” Album appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
