Back in Dunedin for “Surface” by Thorn Dells. As we’ve noted here before, self-releasing through Bandcamp is where you will find the sound of today’s essential exploratory music underground.

“Surface” kicks off with an experimental churn of distorted pitch-shifting keyboards before soon bursting into a dancefloor-friendly slice of psychologically intense electro-pop. Created as a soundscape project collaboration with Pōneke designer JPalm for their SURFACE Fashion Video the song works on its own terms, possessing the same kind of cold crystalline decadence as the music of Chris and Cosey.

Thorn Dells is Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital, Kolya) and Lucinda King (Death And The Maiden, Bad Sav , Floating Island). The Koputai/ Port Chalmers, Ōtepoti/ Dunedin duo’s 2022 album “Silicon Pink” is an essential release you most likely don’t know about. It’s a fantasia of dark hybrid electronic pop, each song a shift in time and space, mixing light and darkness, electronic pop and more exploratory sounds. That something of the quality of “Silicon Pink” and also “Surface” here can be released and be for all practical purposes lost in the infinite data of the internet is both the beauty and tragedy of music-making today.