Strawberry Pills

The dark electro duo from Athens, Greece, takes listeners to some pretty scary and frozen places along its journey from their first EP Conversation Piece, a Depeche Mode-like post-punk revival, to the sinister atmosphere of their latest work. Strawberry Pills’ conceptual artistic project was created in January 2013, concerning music and other forms of art like photography and film. Their sound is marked by Valisia Odell’s majestic bark-at-the-moon howl and Antonis Konstantaras’ lumbering basslines, shimmering guitars and claustrophobic synths, successfully recreating the stereotype of such music styles-wracked vocals about despair and desolation sung over moody sounds.

Ahead of their official debut album set to release in late 2019, the band’s new single “Verbal Suicide”, is their most iconic song yet; it has more shape and balance compared to their previous material. The song occupies the same familiar romantic goth/coldwave territory, riding the kind of Bauhaus’dead-simple descending bassline with dark-hued and bleak lyrics. Valisia’s strong, instantly recognizable voice increases the hazy, narcotic feeling of the song while recreating images of late seventies and early eighties sounds. “Happy birthday to you” she sings and you wish you were dead… Don’t look for any “neologisms” here; nothing is new. But it’s exactly these icy cold textures impressively bathed in the tension and gloom of darkwave that make their music so engaging.