Synth Single Review: “Victims of Light” by Violentene

by Karl Magi

Violentene’s “Victims of Light” shivers with broken emotion and obsession. The song commences with rapidly charging drums and a distantly levitating sound trembling with waiting pain. Electric bass surges forward as the drums erupt, while delicate textures float and Mvrijo’s bittersweet voice carries a haunting melody steeped in shadow.

Her breathy delivery trails through the music with misty feelings, mingling pain and defiance. I enjoy Mvrijo’s range and emotional power as she captures the shattered feelings within the lyrics. Pattering drums add shape while Roland M’s synth contributes soft effulgence.

The low end drives on as the contrasting vocals drift like cobwebs on a midnight breeze. The chorus climbs with melancholy while the foundation charges forward. Moonlit notes pour through the music as Mvrijo pierces me with her emotive delivery and the song ends with gruff bass and softened, fading vocals.

As “something crawls inside me,” the narrator feels as though that thing is breathing down her throat. She adds, “The hole in my heart isn’t as deep as an arrow piercing through my flesh.” She says they have been there before, “longing for the night to fall,” growing in the dark, and wonders if the shadows will catch her fall as “we’re victims of the light.”

Our storyteller asks, “Did you have to betray me, acting like you didn’t care?” because it stripped her of sanity and “turned your bed into my grave.” She questions how the other person sleeps at night “with the fire in your eyes,” still victims of the light. She says that “heavy burdens disappear where shadowed dreams, consumed by fear, collide,” when she is about to lose everything again “from everything you ever took from me.”

To conclude, the narrator declares that she is “losing sight and born again, thicker skin breaking these chains.”