With Gaslight, Black Veils’ fourth studio album for Parisian label Icy Cold Records, the Bologna trio sharpen their most direct post-punk instincts while decisively drifting toward electronica. Written and recorded over two years and arriving four years after Carnage (2021), the record trades raw punk urgency for a colder, more obsessive atmosphere. Recorded by Mario d’Anelli and mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Taibi (Two Moons, Kiša, European Ghost), Gaslight unfolds as a dark choral work: Alessandro Criscitiello’s voice (aka Gregor Samsa) coils around bass-driven melodies, spectral guitar lines, and synths that range from stark minimalism to dense, funereal layers.
The band describes the album as a “funeral party,” and the image fits: ten apocalyptic songs designed for dancing while the world burns. Sardonic yet wounded, furious but lucid, Gaslight captures a familiar post-punk tension between awareness and despair without collapsing into nihilism. Tracks like Nyctalopia, Comedy of Menace, and Piggies dissect contemporary political narratives that deny the obvious, while Buster Keaton and Tightrope Walker emerge as anti-resilience anthems, embracing failure as a form of resistance. Elsewhere, the gravity deepens: Have You Seen Bunny Lake? and Black Kittens Against Privilege confront gender violence and the visible and invisible structures of patriarchy with stark seriousness.
Cinema remains the album’s guiding obsession. Titled after the single inspired by a George Cukor film, Gaslight draws from Preminger, Sjöström, Friedkin, and Keaton, brutally collaging film references into a surreal mirror of the present. The result is a mocking yet intimate sense of defeat — a record that stares into collapse and still insists on movement, turning disillusion into rhythm and ancestral melancholy into a strangely communal dance.