To listen to Radarfield’s new single, “Séance,” is to accept an invitation into a room thick with the scent of old wood and burnt-out candles. The Berlin duo, comprised of Tom on vocals and Marcus on synths, are not merely playing a song; they are conducting a ritual, and we are the anxious audience, leaning in to catch a message from the other side. The track unfolds with a nervous, pulsing energy, the sound of a performer steeling himself before the curtain rises on something deeply uncertain.
There’s a strange, visual quality to the production that keeps snagging my thoughts. Marcus’s synths don’t just build a melody; they erect the crooked, impossible architecture of a silent film set from the Weimar Republic. It’s all sharp angles and deep shadows, the kind that swallow light whole. Floating through this sonic space is Tom’s vocal performance, which isn’t that of a confident frontman, but of the medium himself—brittle, taut with a kind of holy dread, and fighting to keep his voice from cracking under the weight of an obsessive, consuming love for what he is trying to summon.
This isn’t a ghost story for thrills. It feels more like a necessary exorcism, a deliberate confrontation with what the track calls “undead minds,” whether they be past selves or actual spirits. The terror is a tool. The disorienting loss of identity, the feeling of reality bending, is part of a radical process of psychic demolition and reconstruction. It’s the sound of someone willingly walking through a haunted house because they know the only way out is to become a different person on the other side.
By the time the final synth note decays into silence, the room feels both emptier and more crowded than before. So, when the ritual ends, who are you really hoping to hear from—the specters in the static, or the ones you’ve been carrying inside you all along?
