NEW YORK arrived on the scene like a pixelated, impalpable mist – impossible to grasp, yet somehow everywhere. The London-based (obvi) duo forges a perfectly inventive sound that toes the line into the insufferable and pretentious without ever quite crossing it. Emerging from performance and visual art backgrounds, Gretchen Lawrence and Coumba Samba distill ambient dread into something sly and faintly narcotic. Now, their whole aura is the sonic embodiment of their generation’s state of anhedonia, WiFi-enabled intimacy, and stable dissociation – without ever tipping into full dystopia, uncanny valley, or parody.
Today, the pair is releasing ‘together’ – a glitched-out “love ballad” (the quotation marks are necessary) that fractures feeling through samples, bass drops, and the hum of a drum machine on its last nerve. The accompanying video, directed by Anastasiia Vladimirskaia, is a soggy nightmare of AI-rendered cityscapes and decaying collage. If you squint past the distortion, you might even feel something like tenderness. Whether reappearing in a cigarette box, emitting lightning bolts, or standing solemnly next to a giant boombox, the apparitions of NEW YORK continue to flicker at the edge of legibility – and a new kind of sincerity.
