• News

• All

May 31, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Indy Brewer

Last year, Brighton-based rock outfit Dutch Criminal Record returned last year with their latest EP, Apathy Mixtape, the follow-up to their 2021 EP, It’s Gonna Be Okay. Those records found the band evoking indie rock’s euphoric and jangly side, blended with bursts of ‘60s pop harmony. The band have been keeping their momentum up this year with another new track, “Now or Never,” and today they’re back with their latest single, “Gaslight.”

“Gaslight” opens on a simmering spoke-sung cadence before steadily unfurling into moments of joy and triumph. The lyrics meditate on coming of age in uncertain times, jumping between fears in an unending swirl of anxious overthinking. Yet, with the chorus, these tensions settle into an anthemic high, bolstered by buoyant harmonies and shimmering guitar textures. The results soar to cathartic heights but remain rooted in a sense of chaotic uncertainty, retaining a nervy energy that comes bursting out in the track’s propulsive final moments.

The band says of the track, “Gaslight is at its heart a song about being young in the U.K. in the point of history where we find ourselves. Lyrically the song is a chaotic intertwining web may different threads of thought and emotion. Regret about the ending of a relationship, the fatigue of constantly struggling financially, guilt about not being where I feel I should be in life, and anxiety and anger about the state of the world.

The song had quite a difficult birth. The instrumental for the song existed for quite a while before I was able to put any lyrics to it, and when I did I really struggled to find a fitting way to express the themes on the song in an emotionally fitting way. I tried a technique used by Thom Yorke and David Bowie called cut-up technique where I wrote down different lines which felt like themes I wanted to talk about, cut them out and threw them into a bag, picking them out at random to try and organise them into verses. By using this technique I hoped to mimic the chaotic anxious overthinking lots of 20-somethings are experiencing right now. The verses are like a tormented internal dialogue of stresses, never settling on a single thought or theme but jumping around in a way that many overthinkers have experienced.”

Check out the song below, out everywhere now.