Turn it off, this channel’s boring, see?
This is not how my life was supposed to be
So I take this poison inside of me
There is a delicious stupidity in trying to escape a miserable situation by making choices almost guaranteed to leave you worse off. The promise of feeling alive again has filled bars, emptied bank accounts, inspired regrettable phone calls, and sent countless people back into relationships they had good reason to leave.
New England darkwave outfit Ghost Painted Sky have built Kissing Lions around one of humanity’s more dependable talents: recognizing the jaws directly in front of us and deciding, against every scrap of available evidence, to lean closer anyway. Taken from the forthcoming Failure Blooms, the song captures those moments when boredom and disappointment have accumulated enough weight that almost any escape starts to look reasonable, including the varieties with sharp teeth.
The band began in Massachusetts in 2014 as David Strong’s project, expanding into a genuine partnership when vocalist and lyricist Lisa Wood joined in 2018. Guitarist Michael Boudreau followed in 2022, while longtime collaborator Aurora Grabill adds violin here and elsewhere on the album. What they produce on “Kissing Lions” belongs comfortably within darkwave and post-punk, though its real engine is psychological: the familiar urge to make some reckless little bargain with yourself because ordinary life has become intolerably beige.
Wood sings from inside that bargain. The rising tide gets pushed away, the television gets switched off, poison gets swallowed, and eventually the lion receives a kiss directly on the mouth. You can practically hear the terrible idea becoming attractive in real time. The metaphor works because lions remain perfectly innocent in this arrangement. They were always going to bite. The speaker is the one grabbing the teeth.
“Kissing Lions describes those mostly vain attempts to seize on anything that creates a fleeting feeling of being alive for a moment amid relentless waves of the humdrum, doldrums, and failure, which so often end up being misguided and ultimately just creating a thicker mire even more strangling than the original situation one sought to escape… bad decisions that bite back and create further downward spirals,” says Strong.
Strong’s accompanying video stretches that idea across generations, combining 8mm footage shot by his grandfather, Herbert Virta, with material from a 2023 virtual performance for Goths for Sanctuaries and footage from The Heavy Culture Cooperative in Easthampton, Massachusetts, filmed in August 2026 with projected visuals by Daisy. Past and present collide without becoming sentimental window dressing; time simply keeps advancing while people continue finding increasingly elaborate ways to get bitten.
Watch the video for Kissing Lions below:
The digital maxi-single adds the brighter Kissing Lions (Effervescent Remix) and My Words Are Not My Own, which turns toward conformity and the slow surrender of individual voice. Mixed and mastered by William Faith, Failure Blooms follows 2018’s Flightless. Eight years later, Ghost Painted Sky sounds preoccupied with failure less as an ending than as a remarkably fertile place to keep making the same disastrous choices.
Listen to Kissing Lions below and order the single here.
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The post Bad Decisions Bite Back in New England Darkwave Trio Ghost Painted Sky’s Video for “Kissing Lions” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
