An obsession, exaggeration
Lust, desire and adoration
Lose yourself in someone else
Limerence closes every door
Robots In Love have the sort of name that promises chrome-plated heartbreak, and their latest single Cease and Desist delivers an emotional sucker punch. The New Zealand dark electronic duo of vocalist-producer Elenor Rayner and drummer-producer Alex Burchell builds the song around obsession gone feral: attraction narrowing into fixation, fixation hardening into dependency, and reason getting shoved somewhere beneath the furniture. There is no polite exit once the appetite starts feeding on itself.
The guitars come down hard, with hardcore licks driven right up against industrial metal without quite falling into Ministry cosplay. There is some of SINE’s bruising electronic pressure here, along with the blackened mechanical weight of latter-day Gary Numan, while the bigger synth architecture brushes against HEALTH, Nine Inch Nails, Sirus, and V.A.S.T. Burchell’s drumming has the clipped exactitude of somebody who has spent years learning how machines think, while Rayner sings from inside the mess those machines could never clean up.
Desire behaves like bad wiring in the skull, making sleeplessness feel necessary and self-erasure almost reasonable. The chorus grows huge enough to suggest somebody shouting through concrete, yet the verses keep dragging the listener back toward the private humiliation of knowing exactly what is happening and remaining unable to stop it.
“I recently discovered the word ‘limerence’ and started thinking about extreme obsession,” says Rayner. “Hence the line “limerence closes every door” where no amount of reasoning can get through. Musically, it’s got dark, heavy riffs, cinematic synths and an epic chorus.”
The video, directed by Lichen Sorrel and Rayner, places the band inside a rain-soaked environment where reality keeps slipping sideways. Their movements feel slowed and strangely detached, as though the performers have wandered into somebody else’s private hallucination and decided to finish the set anyway.
Watch the video for Cease and Desist below:
Rayner has been working toward this collision for decades. She began playing Australian pubs on bass at fourteen before moving into electronic production on an Atari computer, “which opened up a universe of creating sounds and moulding them into rhythms and melodies until they evoke the exact feeling I need.” Her history runs through Soulscraper, Sobriquet, Snog, and The Crystalline Effect before Robots In Love took shape in New Zealand in 2017. Joined by Burchell in this current powerhouse incarnation, the project has developed a nasty elegance that can turn technical precision into emotional damage.
With second album OVERRIDE ahead and guitarist Henry Flynn Wall joining the record, Cease and Desist makes obsession feel less romantic than chemical, compulsive, and absurd in the terrible way our worst impulses often are. Love may open doors, but limerence bolts them shut from the inside.
Listen to Cease and Desist below and pre-order OVERRIDE here.
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The post “Limerence Closes Every Door” — Obsession Rains Down in Robots in Love’s Video for “Cease and Desist” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
