With The Widows and their jagged new single “Bardo Blues”, the speakers don’t just output sound; they seem to physically sweat. From the opening seconds, this track captures the exact frequency of a nervous breakdown occurring in a dimly lit restroom of a venue that definitely violates several health codes.
This London quartet, Kim Le Tan, Francesco Manzi, Roger Salsas, and Vince Johnson, has been cutting their teeth on the legacy of The Stooges and The Cramps, but here they’ve stripped the glamour away, leaving only the raw, twitching nerves. The instrumentation creates a frantic, claustrophobic box. We are hit with a driving, fuzzy bassline that feels like the onset of a migraine, battling against jangly, distorted guitars that cut and scrape like steel wool on a sunburn. It is garage rock, certainly, but it carries the Post-Punk revivalist torch into a very dark cave.
Somewhere in the distortion, I found myself inexplicably thinking about the smell of ozone right before a storm hits that static charge that makes the hair on your arms stand up.
That tension mirrors the song’s terrifying philosophy. The lyrics grapple with identity dissolution, that dizzying unmooring from reality where “self” becomes a slippery concept. The vocalist delivers a performance that is raw and strained, sliding into a mumbled spoken cadence during the bridge that feels less like a performance and more like a confession you weren’t supposed to hear. It’s a desperate plea for regression, a desire to crawl back into a primal oblivion rather than face the confusing geometry of the present.
“Bardo Blues” is a frantic, gritty, and anxious piece of art. It’s aggressive catharsis that leaves you wondering: are you listening to the music, or is the music watching you fall apart?
