Supra Nova. Caleb Loomis. I Love You, I Hate You. Names and titles, huh? They sit there, inert, until sound breathes meaning – or utter confusion – into them. And this… this single from the Salt Lake City artist? It’s confusion, alright. The kind that grabs you by the throat and whispers…no wait, can I use whisper… screams sweet, violent nothings into your ear.
The press release says, “emotional duality.” Understatement. It’s less a tug-of-war and more a full-body slam into the concrete wall separating affection and annihilation. The song, an industrialized cyberpunk dark-pop fever dream, is all sharp edges and synthetic sinews. It’s the sound of heartbreak played on a broken circuit board, glitches and synth waves contorting into… love? Hate? Who even knows anymore? The lyrical content is a minefield of juxtaposed tenderness, violent, raw power, and chilling repetition. The shift between dominance and complete submission occurs nearly at random, with lines such as “I adore you I’ll destroy you,” “I’ll carve my name into your mind.”
Candy. Lips. Serpent. Kiss.
It’s like stumbling into a deleted scene from Blade Runner, where a replicant discovers codependency and a chainsaw. There are echoes of early Nine Inch Nails, but…demented, I don’t know, has anyone actually read the Marquis de Sade while listening to Depeche Mode? It feels like that kind of uncomfortable, an almost beautiful horror.
The central theme is possessive and destructively volatile, this toxic, almost horrific and ravenous adoration that erases boundaries, a vortex that consumes everything that dares come near, including, and perhaps especially, its originator.
Loomis throws cyberpunk, industrial, and a dash of glitch into a blender. With what, exactly? He hasn’t invented a new genre. But there’s a visceral, almost theatrical intensity here. He’s crafted, no. Forged. Forged something sharp and dangerous, something.
This feeling…did Supra Nova / Caleb Loomis just mainlined humanity’s darkest impulses directly into a synthesizer? Where do you even file that?
