Dez Dare‘s fifth full-lenght album, CHERYL! Your Love Shines Down Like A Supernova’s Death, is a daring, dynamic, and strangely beautiful eruption of sound and satire. It crackles with feedback and irony. It glows with absurdity and thought. It punches, kisses, and then it disappears, leaving your head ringing. Dare is a punk philosopher in disguise. He doesn’t preach nor whisper. He shouts into the void with wit, honesty, and wild, shapeshifting sonics. Based in Brighton, but born from the fuzzed-out underbelly of Geelong’s punk scene in the 1990s, Dez Dare has long embraced contradictions. He’s noisy and nuanced, funny and forlorn, DIY and cosmic. With this release, he steps further into his own world, built from distortion, existential riddles, and rhythms that lurch and twist like a protest march gone beautifully sideways. This is a fully realized work, tight in execution and wide in ambition. From scratch to finish, the album feels like a single stream of thought. Or maybe more like a dream inside a factory, or a party inside a mind unraveling. But a fun party. With feedback.
The sound is expertly controlled chaos. Acid psych-punk burns at the edges, blistering and wild. Art-punk stabs through the center, angular, twitchy, intelligent. You can hear echoes of Devo, Gang Of Four, and Wire in the sharpness. You can feel The Stranglers in the synth bends. There’s rawness borrowed from the nineties garage rock underground, grimy, stubborn, and loud. And beneath it all, a rhythm section that stomps and slithers like the best of Viagra Boys, propelling the soundscapes forward with force and swing. But this release does not rely upon nostalgia. Dez Dare is not mimicking his influences. The instrumentations included within the entire album are raw and intentional. Every squeal, thump, crackle, and warble is placed with care. The distortion is sculpted, the noise has edges, and the whole thing feels alive, beating, breathing, blistering. Dare writes lyrics like a street poet. He questions everything. He pokes holes in the social fabric and then dances in the unraveling threads. He tackles distraction, vanity, overconsumption, and suburban sameness with the kind of absurdist clarity that only someone who has truly paid attention can pull off. His wit is dry but not cruel. His cynicism is warm. He invites us to laugh with him, not at the world, but at how strange it is to live in it.
There’s a humanity in this record. Beneath the blips and bangs and buzz, there is a longing for connection and attention. For truth, maybe. Or just for a second of stillness in a world that never stops selling us something. Dare doesn’t give us answers, but he gives us soundtracks for asking better questions. The production is impressive and refreshingly personal. You can feel that this album was made in a room, by a person, with heart and soul. Dez Dare has always been a hands-on artist, and this record, like his previous work, benefits from that touch. It feels crafted, not manufactured. Still, this fifth outing shows growth. It’s bigger in sound, more confident, and more playful in its purpose. Backing vocals by Laura Loriga and Jonny Halifax bring surprising textures, breathy, soulful, surreal. Halifax’s lap steel work adds a ghostly shimmer to the already warped canvas, expanding Dare’s palette without softening it. These additions aren’t gimmicks, they’re threads that bind the chaos into something strangely cohesive. CHERYL! Your Love Shines Down Like A Supernova’s Death is simultaneously dramatic, funny, cosmic, and domestic. It asks: what does it mean to love, to live, to notice, in a world built to distract us from ourselves? And more importantly: how do we scream about it in a way that still grooves?
This is an album that refuses to be ignored but it does fit easily on playlists. It doesn’t fade into the background. It stands in the middle of the room and makes noise until you listen. And when you do, it rewards you with laughter and reflection. At a time when much of indie rock is drifting toward reverb-drenched melancholy or algorithm-friendly mush, Dez Dare is a welcome jolt of clarity. His music points out that punk rock music can still be smart, noise can still be meaningful, and absurdity can still be art. He makes records that feel like manifestos written in neon, sung through a bullhorn, blasted through fuzz pedals and synth wires. It’s tempting to call Dare a “cult artist” but his music implies that it needs to be heard by the broader auditorium. This material shines with so many impressive moments that you’ll spin it repeatedly over and over again, and then recommend it to your friends. It’s one of those records that immediately gets wraps around your listening apparatus and refuses to let go. With CHERYL!, Dez Dare proves once again that he is one of the most interesting, inventive, and important voices in underground rock today. He doesn’t whisper from the edges. He yells from the middle and makes a noise that counts. This is a record for the distracted, the disillusioned, and the defiant. For those who still believe that music can shake things loose. That laughter can be revolutionary. That weirdness is not a costume, but a kind of truth. Dez Dare shines in the noise and he shines through it. And if this is what a supernova’s death sounds like, bright, explosive, beautiful, then we should all be listening. Head to Dez Dare’s Bandcamp page for more information about ordering this fine piece of sonic artistry on vinyl.
Thoughts Words Action 