Listening to Violet Whimsey’s new EP, “PERSEPHONE,” is a bit like finding an antique music box that only plays minor chords. You wind it up, expecting a delicate tune, but what emerges is something far more shadowed, intricate, and possessed of a strange, chilling beauty. This is dark pop that doesn’t just brood; it excavates.
The collection is a descent, a guided tour through various chambers of loss. We begin on the outside looking in with “No Stars,” a song that feels like being seen through distorted glass. It’s a hymn for anyone who has had their story rewritten for them by others, a defiant pushback against a world quick to judge the scars it cannot comprehend. Then, the betrayal gets personal. “Sly” chronicles the particular hollowness of watching a friend trade their soul for a seat at the table, their transformation feeling less like a glow-up and more like the dimming of a vital light.
From there, things get wonderfully weird. “Sally” drops us into a kind of cosmic pinball machine, where life is a random game of flashing lights and coin-toss chances. It captures that frantic feeling of shouting into a hurricane, trying to be heard over the relentless clatter of a system that wasn’t built to listen. It smells, oddly, like ozone and cheap arcade coffee. The cinematic synths throughout the EP hum with the specific frequency of a city street after a heavy rain, when the neon signs blur and every reflection seems to hold a secret.
The final stages of the journey are the most intimate. “What Happened To Our Love” picks through the debris of a relationship, not with fury, but with a forensic sorrow, while the closer, “Still Here,” is the EP’s most devastating moment. It’s a quiet declaration of presence that sounds an awful lot like a cage, the sound of waiting for a ghost in a house that is no longer a home.
“PERSEPHONE” is an exercise in finding the dark, jeweled beauty in the wreckage. This is the sound of learning to rule a kingdom you never asked for. But once you have the crown, what do you do with it?
