Shape-shifting rocker Des Rocs channels the mania and melancholy of NYC in “Pieces”

Up-and-coming New York native Des Rocs has an awful lot to say and a markedly diverse way of saying it. His new track “Pieces” is a song soaked in the dark intrigue of cult writer Hubert Selby Jr’s New York: a shadowy, shifting underbelly filled with floating spectres all living out their own daily depravities.

Musically, the frantic track sits in a uniquely marvellous inter-zone of 21 Pilots and Patrick Wolf, brimming with orchestrated musical reprieves and crescendos, lickety-split glitchy break-beats and oscillating vocals that touch both the supernal and the chthonic; vocals contorting so much that at times they sound like a melancholic Isaac Brock, at other times Matt Bellamy doing his best Freddie Mercury impression.

Des Rocs’ narrator darts through this claustrophobic, vibrant aural city, pushing aside the hordes as he screams out to an indifferent abyss, his deranged lyrics bleeding a very Pynchonesque paranoia, crying out at one point, “careful, you're wasting away / And now everyone's suspicious”.

It’s a rich sonic vision that even at this early juncture in his career feels entirely his own, the track forever sitting on that tantalising edge of the unknown, something Des Rocs has commented on previously, remarking, “there’s a certain beauty in being close to the edge. I guess it sounds scary, but I feel that’s where the best art lies”.

It’s a truly captivating melting pot of sound that captures New York’s neurotic ambition, a city with scores more victims than winners, where a sense of hope either ends up in lights or falls between the cracks of the city’s pavements.