memento mori became so much more than a Stoic soundbite in the latest spectrally haunting alt-electronica release from Raoul. The independent Los Angeles-based artist, currently building towards a full-length album while writing, producing and recording his own music, treats the phrase as a doorway into disconnection, fate and the emotional wreckage left crumbling around loneliness after intimacy fractures.
The electronic percussion will instantly draw comparisons to Billie Eilish, but the real pull sits in the ethereal atmosphere oscillating around the four-to-the-floor indie electro-pop frame. Raoul wraps diaphanously sugared vocals around the track’s darker edges, carrying some of Lorde’s cinematic emotional scale and Labrinth’s score-like grandeur into a chorus that bursts into an emo-adjacent, Fidlar-esque crescendo. T
Raoul’s background in scoring and visual storytelling strengthens the single without weighing it down. The production’s swelling dissonance, especially as the outro grows increasingly abrasive, perfectly visualises the pain of disconnection when it seems fated in the stars. Even Lana Del Rey’s subverted Americana flickers through the emotional architecture, but Raoul keeps the track accountably tender and free from theatrical self-pity.
It sounds like the kind of single that could have been an instant hit in the early 00s while still holding chart-topper potential today. Apparently, dark pop has been silently crying out to feel the teeth from such a viscerally spectral bite all this time. Who knew?
memento mori is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.
Review by Amelia Vandergast
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