Violet Love has offered up an EP titled “Destined to Fail,” and it arrives less like a prediction and more like a pre-existing condition, a medical chart for a soul that’s been diagnosed with itself. The DIY recording quality doesn’t feel lo-fi for aesthetics; it feels necessary, like these songs could only have been born in a sealed-off room where the air was getting thin. This is a closed-circuit conversation with generations of ghosts and the rattling of one’s own bones.
On “Apple,” the admission of having one’s lungs “carved out” doesn’t just evoke emptiness. For a fleeting moment, it conjured in my mind the unnerving precision of a 17th-century anatomical etching—all labeled parts and clinical detachment, a diagram where the spirit has already fled the machine. The pain here isn’t a fresh wound; it’s ancient, inherited, and cataloged. This inherited chill then bleeds into “Serpent,” a tight, coiling track of self-sabotage where the enemy isn’t some external force but an “infection” in the garden of the self.
By the final track, “Artist,” the exhaustion is palpable. After grappling with the pain passed down and the pain self-made, the burden shifts to the bleak responsibility of using it as paint. This isn’t presented as triumphant catharsis but as grim, lonely work. The resulting creation is “doused in red and green,” the visceral colors of a fresh wound and something sicker, something like envy or rot. This EP offers no cure, no convenient exit from the cycle it so bravely documents.
After declaring yourself both the disease and the artist, where on earth do you hang the painting?
