On the cotton candy sky
Written every moment of life
For all eternity
Wonder why we are even alive
Some records come from a scene, some from a city, and some seem to come from that ugly five-minute interval after you have stared at your phone too long and suddenly hate civilization. Faded Flowers, the latest album from Turkish Darkwave duo Ductape, belongs to the third category. It looks around at modern life: crowded rooms, digital selves, obedient routines, private disintegration, and finds a species that has become astonishingly good at maintaining appearances while quietly running itself into the ground.
Çağla Güleray and Furkan Güleray formed Ductape in 2019 in Istanbul, where their mix of post-punk, darkwave, Turkish and English lyrics quickly carried them well beyond the usual underground boundaries. Four albums and two EPs later, they have relocated their creative base to France. Geography changes; the unease travels well.
On Faded Flowers, that unease has acquired a larger target.
The title gives you the central image without turning it into homework: people as flowers left too long beneath bad light, drained by repetition, expectation, isolation, and the exhausting business of becoming whatever the surrounding machinery finds acceptable. You can hear that pressure everywhere. The basslines have the cold discipline of public transport at six in the morning. Synthesizers cut through with little sympathy. Furkan’s guitar keeps finding ways to sound agitated without becoming decorative, sometimes stalking around Çağla’s voice, sometimes answering it, sometimes scraping at the walls.
Çağla’s magnificent voice remains the great destabilizing force in Ductape. She can sound detached enough to frighten you, then suddenly let some exposed nerve show through before the song has time to make a ceremony of it. There is very little comfort in that delivery, which suits an album concerned with the absurdity of living among millions of people and still feeling marooned.
That particular contradiction runs all through Faded Flowers. Everyone is visible now. Everyone is reachable. Everyone is encouraged to construct a public version of themselves, polish it, post it, improve it, defend it, sell it, then wake up tomorrow and do the same miserable maintenance all over again. Somewhere along the line, identity became administrative labour.
Ductape sounds thoroughly fed up with the arrangement.
The album keeps circling the false authorities people submit to without necessarily believing in them: social roles, digital identities, manufactured ideals, systems of power, inherited expectations, all those little invisible rules that become oppressive mostly because nobody remembers agreeing to them. There is anger in these songs, but also exhaustion, and the exhaustion may be more interesting. Rage still assumes you have energy to spare.
Fine considers one dubious convenience of hitting bottom: at least you can stop pretending the view is lovely. The album’s first single follows a collapse through pain and disorientation toward an unexpected sense of ownership, as Çağla finds a place for herself inside the very circumstances that have undone her. A steady bassline and luminous synthesizers carry her weary composure, giving that uneasy acceptance room to develop. There is something wonderfully suspect about feeling comfortable down there, and the song lets the suspicion sit beside the relief. Within an album preoccupied with keeping up appearances, surrendering the performance becomes its own small freedom.
The accompanying black-and-white video turns that process into a homemade alchemical experiment. Filmed at Misuc in Ankara, it casts the duo as silent-film experimenters collecting ingredients and tending a potion among curious specimens. Ductape handled the direction, styling, and production, with camera work by Mert Yalçın and editing by Çağla Güleray. Its antique laboratory makes an apt workshop for two people attempting to assemble another version of themselves.
Standout track Obscure moves with a bassline so blunt and heavy it seems capable of carrying the song by itself, while Furkan Güleray’s distorted guitar keeps worrying at the edges, leaving abrasions rather than decoration. Synths hang overhead with an icy, almost antiseptic quality, giving the music the uneasy stillness of a room where something unpleasant has already been said. Çağla Güleray sings in English, her low register remarkably composed as she picks through disillusionment without dressing it up for sympathy. That restraint makes the words hit harder. Stolen light, dead idols, resentment calcified through repetition, the dull vacancy that follows years of believing in something that eventually reveals itself as another instrument of control: Obscure gathers these ideas until the song begins to feel less like despair than the slow recognition of how thoroughly faith can be exploited. There is damage here, certainly, but also the uncomfortable clarity that comes when the old explanations have finally stopped working.
Its Berlin performance video brings that severity onto the stage. Directed by Altay Erlik, with cinematography by Emrah Celik and laser animation by Peter Isachenko, the clip concentrates on the duo’s physical presence, giving the song’s accusations the directness of an encounter across a crowded room.
On Gölgesiz, the effort of continuing becomes almost physical. Sung in Turkish, the album’s second single carries accumulated sorrow through persistent drums and guitar figures that seem caught in the same argument with themselves. Çağla keeps her delivery measured, making fatigue audible through the weight she gives each phrase. The rhythm maintains its appointment with the next bar while the person inside it struggles to find a reason to follow. That uneasy relationship between bodily momentum and emotional depletion gives the song its force, extending the album’s concern with lives organised around obligations that have outlasted their meaning.
Made during Ductape’s Latin American tour, the monochrome DIY video places Çağla against expanses of water and open space, her figure often reduced to a silhouette. Visual distortions make her outline appear unstable, as though even occupying a body has become difficult work. The images give the song’s isolation a scale that the surrounding emptiness only enlarges.
Faded Flowers gains its pull from the sense that decay is something social as much as personal. The individual breaks down because the surrounding structure is already cracked. The city keeps moving. The screen keeps glowing. The machine keeps asking for another password. Somewhere inside all that, a person still has to decide who they are. Ductape leave that question open, with the bass still moving underneath it.
Listen to Faded Flowers below and order the album here.
To celebrate the album release, Ductape have announced headline shows and festival dates across Europe well into 2027.
Tour Dates
2026
2027
*Festival date range; Ductape’s exact performance day remains unconfirmed in the listings checked.
Follow Ductape:
The post Turkish Darkwave Duo Ductape Confront the Slow Decay of Modern Life on New Album “Faded Flowers” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
