Gloomy post-punks Whispering Sons return from the darkness with new single “Surface”

On their new track “Surface”, the Belgian quintet summon the sonic spectre of Joy Division-era British post-punk, with front-woman Fenne Kuppens’ haunting low-register supplicating “suck me back in / before I sink back into shape”, in a whirl of nerve-wracking bass and arrhythmic drums.

The shuttering song is accompanied by an equally engrossing, sepia-drenched video, which Kuppens describes as exuding "the theme of isolation in a cyclical and circling world” by “combining images of a woman singing in bright white light alongside flashing sceneries of destruction, a lost city, stone formations and rough structured landscapes”.

The compact, claustrophobic song is both a deepening and an extension of their tenebrous aura that continues to channel the lost sound of their adopted home of Brussels, Belgium – gloomy music’s forgotten mecca.

During the 1980s, the rainy European capital was home to infamous labels Les Disques du Crépuscule (co-founded by Ian Curtis’ reputed mistress Annik Honoré) and L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords, both true purveyors of music’s liminal side; releasing records by Benelux and British harbingers of gloom Josef K, Coil, Repetition, Current 93 and Cabaret Voltaire, among countless others.

In homage to the city that conceived it, “Surface” is a confounding, confusing and continually climaxing song of dead-ends, narrowing avenues and night-time awareness that only disappears with the break of dawn. There’s a reason why they call it the Low Lands.