Tag: Total Fucking Darkness Take It Easy

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Total Fucking Darkness Shares Yearning, Pop Gem “This Is The Last Time”

Electronic music outfit and JOVM mainstays Total Fucking Darkness features: 

Over the past 18 months or so, the trio have released a handful of standalone singles, including “Desolation Boys,” “Take It Easy,” “Give Me Everything You Own” “Horizontal Rain” and “Beaten to Write.” Their latest single “This Is The Last Time” is glistening sophistipop-meets-80s New Wave-meets New Order-like tune anchored around what may arguably be the most melodic and the most earnest and achingly oversized yearning song of the trio’s growing catalog.

Sonically, “This Is The Last Time” sees the JOVM mainstays looking backward to move forward. Campbell, Ramsey and McFall have had a long-held obsession with late 1980s and early 1990s electronic music, and the new single pushes that fixation towards its biggest pop-leaning instincts. There aren’t software shortcuts hiding beneath the surface either. “No plug-ins, anywhere. This track is all analog, baby.”

When asked what inspired it, Total Fucking Darkness’ Stephen Ramsey offers a characteristically economic answer, “New Order.”

“This Is The Last Time” arrived with similarly little ceremony. Ramsay had barely made it through the instrumental once before Torquil Campbell had the lyrics ready. “It may as well be called ‘Real Time’ because Torq wrote this in real time,” Ramsay explains. “By the time I played him the instrumental once, he had written the lyrics.”

“‘This Is The Last Time” is about the point where letting go becomes forward motion, following whatever dream remains, committing to it completely, and accepting that the only sensible response to uncertainty is to set your heart on fire — and see what survives.

“Every band says their latest music is the best thing they’ve ever done,”the band’s Stephen Ramsay says. “It’s obviously cliché at this point and therefore categorically untrue in almost all cases, but I’m telling you, this is the best song we’ve written.”

The accompanying video features edited footage from some movie that follows two dogs, who are in love. It’s adorable.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Total Fucking Darkness Shares Deceptively Upbeat “Beaten to Write”

Electronic music outfit and JOVM mainstays Total Fucking Darkness features: 

Over the past year or so, the trio have released a handful of standalone singles, including four that I’ve written about, “Desolation Boys,” “Take It Easy,” “Give Me Everything You Own” and “Horizontal Rain.”  

The trio’s latest single, “Beaten to Write” is a world weary tune paired with a deceptively bright, playful and hook-driven production that seemingly channels mid 80s New Order. Anchored around a relentless motorik pulse, the song is perfectly designed for getting your energy up for another day of drudgery at a soul-sucking day job. And its core, the song seems to suggest that as adults, we have to find ways to accept and deal with drudgery and bullshit, and then push past it — as much as possible.

Continuing the visual approach of its immediate predecessor, the accompanying visualizer/video for “Beaten to Write” features a masked man in a hoodie dancing and shadow boxing an abandoned factory space, with glitchy imagery projected around him.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Total Fucking Darkness Returns with Club Banging “Horizontal Rain”

Electronic music outfit and JOVM mainstays Total Fucking Darkness features: 

Last year, the trio released have released a handful of standalone singles, including three I wrote about on this site, “Desolation Boys,” “Take It Easy” and “Give Me Everything You Own.”

The trio begin 2026 with “Horizontal Rain,” an off-kilter, propulsive, hook-driven banger that recalls the days of sweaty, illegal basement raves. (Those who know, know, you know?) But underneath the good times, is the feverish unease, the sickening sense of sliding into a totalitarian and fascistic hellscape and the desire to connect to others. This is the party music of a dying world.

The accompanying video is a mind-bending blend of a middle aged guy dancing in various locations with video glitch, edited stock footage and more.

New Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Total Fucking Darkness Returns with Woozily Hypnotic “Give Me Everything You Own”

Electronic music outfit Total Fucking Darkness features: 

The trio have released two singles, which I’ve written about on this site, “Desolation Boys,” and “Take It Easy.” Their latest single “Give Me Everything You Own” is an unsettlingly woozy and hypnotic fever dream that’s one-part Tweekend-era The Crystal Method rave, one-part brooding dream pop and one-part howl into the void.

“We live in a late-period capitalist wasteland where art is devalued and podcasters are the new creative upper class. What a fucking bore,” the trio share. “‘Give Me Everything You Own’ is a reminder of the intrinsic, anarchic power of our music. We made it to feel like a nice cold wet fish slapping you upside the head to remind you not to fall asleep in your own life, that connection matters, that a dancefloor can be the site of rebellion and dissent. Don’t forget that cunts are still running the world…” 

The accompanying video is a flop sweat-fueled fever dream of nightmarish war imagery and brightly colored summery scenes that captures our ongoing hellscape. But all is not lost, y’all. Go to shows, dance floors, theater and meet like-minded souls. Community is always the solution to fascism.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Total Fucking Darkness Shares a Sardonic and Uneasy Banger

Besides being an awesome band name, Total Fucking Darkness features: 

Earlier this year, the trio shared “Desolation Boys,” a slick yet chaotic synthesis of Tweekend-era Crystal Method and Come With Us-era Chemical Brothers-like big beat, LCD Soundsystem and deep house with glistening synth arpeggios delivered with a nihilistic, tongue-in-cheek absurdity.

Created in the final hours of a manic, 72-hour writing spree with McFall flying in from London, “Desolation Boys” encapsulates the band’s volatile energy. The song is anchored around spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness-like lyrics and a raw vocal take where Campbell can be faintly heard yelling “go fuck yourself,” mid-chorus. Who is he yelling at? Himself, perhaps? 

The song reflects the band’s ongoing exploration of themes like the futility of existence, the exciting pointlessness of class war and the rejection of everything that doesn’t BANG. 

The trio returns with “Take It Easy,” a relentlessly pulsing and unsettling track that pairs propulsive dance floor friendly energy with a tongue-in-cheek and irreverent sense of despair. The song finds the trio daring listeners to embrace the void rather than resist it; to readily acknowledge that the world and everything you know is on fire and there may be little you can do about it. As the old saying goes “Might as well laugh, ’cause it hurts too much to cry.”

The irony of the song’s title isn’t an accident. The song is anchored around a platitudinous phrase used as a bitingly sardonic weapon in an our hellish, at times, Kafka-esque moment.

Written in real-time, “Take It Easy” was born from pure instinct. The trio’s Torquil Campbell wrote the lyrics while listening to the track for the first time, which baffles his bandmates Stephen Ramsey and Tom McFall. And there are sheep. Yeah, sheep.

“There are sheep involved in the track. It’s not the first song I’ve heard with sheep in it this year,” Total Fucking Darkness’ Ramsey says. “If you think about it, songs with sheep in them are an incredibly good sign, because there’s never been a bad song that mentions, or actually features sheep. Think about it.”