DISSIMULATOR have put "Neon Metropolis" online, the second single from "Artifice Dissolves", which arrives October 2 on 20 Buck Spin. We covered the album announcement and the first single, "Alloyed", back in August.
The new one started with the Montreal trio's guitarist and vocalist walking around his own city at night. "Inspired by reveries borne of nighttime strolls in Montreal, 'Neon Metropolis' depicts a flâneur meandering through an autonomous megacity," Claude Leduc writes.
That word choice is doing real work. The flâneur is Baudelaire's figure, the unhurried urban stroller who exists to read a crowd — and Leduc has dropped one into a city where there is no longer a crowd to read.
"A hymn-like chorus underscores the mood of alienated despair while the song's urgent cadence mimics human and machine bustling to the restless beat of the cybernetic hive," he continues. "This city is not made for human life; it is without community; without history; without finality. Those who adapt see themselves reduced to mere utility, while the rest are condemned to haunt the shadows of the system's forgotten crevices."
And then the thesis, which is the same one he has been arguing all album: "It is the untenable result of life being in service to ever greater technological efficiency and development, rather than directing technical knowledge for the purposes of life."
Put the two singles side by side and the record's argument snaps into focus. "Alloyed" was Günther Anders' Promethean shame — the individual who feels inferior to his own machines and volunteers to become one. "Neon Metropolis" is what a city looks like once everybody has taken that deal. Same thesis, scaled up from one body to a skyline.
Musically it does what the band do: razor-wire guitar lines intersecting at impossible angles, with Philippe Boucher and Antoine Daigneault driving the track through cycles of acceleration, collapse and reassembly. The trio are drawn from CHTHE'ILIST, ATRAMENTUS, BEYOND CREATION and INCANDESCENCE, and "Artifice Dissolves" is their second album after 2024's "Lower Form Resistance".
For the full track listing, production credits and pre-order details, see our album announcement.
Pre-order: 20 Buck Spin webshop · Bandcamp