Neoliberal society is individualistic by design. Every fear and worry is your problem, a private concern to be experienced and addressed by you alone. As psychedelic music and its close ties to drug culture have always been counter-cultural, that of the eighties could be viewed as a reaction to politics at a time when Reagan and Thatcher ruled. However, for all of its counter cultural hope of freedom and community, the drug scene is itself stymied by an inherent self-absorption, each trip a personal experience no matter how transcendent it might feel. Paradoxically, the freedom comes to take on its own neoliberal flavour—a freedom to be bought and experienced in regular doses, meted out to those with the money or time to partake.
Doused, the third album from Brooklyn’s Dead Painters out today on Rue Defense, operates with this awareness. Tapping into the spirit of bands like The Cure and Talk Talk but stripping away their psychoactive excesses, the record instead relies on the universality on lived experience to reject the inhuman logic of society and forge connection. Lead single ‘Marigold’, which we shared last month, is one one such example, offering an empathetic take on anxieties around death and ageing and providing a glimpse into the key theme of the album. As we wrote in our preview:
The lyrics [of ‘Marigold’] are plagued by the vaguely vertiginous sense of time passing, months and years sliding past beneath your feet, but the vocals remain soft and kindhearted nonetheless. Because rather than homing in on the dread of death, Dead Painters reflect their focus off of its surface, facing not ahead in terrified wait of the approaching end but rather all around. For there are others on this slow march. The journey need not be alone.
Second single ‘Sit Tight’ has a similarly compassionate view of negative experiences. The track is “about wanting to do something great,” bassist and vocalist TC Brownell explains, “feeling frustrated that it’s not happening, and then realizing nobody but you really cares and we’re all gonna die someday.” But rather than being cynical or fatalistic, the song instead uses the realisation as a springboard toward a healthier, more compassionate mode of existence. If you mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, then neither do your problems—be they small personal hang-ups or vast existential concerns.
Doused is therefore a record not of answers but comforts. It’s an album which understands that unanswerable questions will always remain just that, and one which finds solace in the fact that this truth applies to everyone. For there is solidarity in our certain demise, our ubiquitous fear and suffering, and while recognising this idea will not save us in the end, it can open up a space in which we might live unburdened.
Doused is out today on Rue Defense and you can get it from the Dead Painters Bandcamp page.