Witness intimacy as digital meltdown with their new post-punk track
Lil Narnia’s music is a message about the past sent from the future. With his new project’s single, the genre-defying artist draws together the nostalgic debris of our ruined present into materials for the intensification of pop. After starting a band with Local Zero playfully named after the infamous Belle Delphine, their first single “Bite Down” sheds more than just their names, trading out the drum machine that has been the signature of Narnia’s sound for dense, churning post-punk. Live drums and surging guitar sit beneath the piercing earworm of a vocal that is all hook. Narnia’s words can scarcely be made out amidst the crunch and warmth of the instrumental. For brief moments, though, intelligibility ruptures the wall of sound, exposing a gasp of narrative that is immediately swallowed in hurtling motion. We may not understand the words, but we know what he is saying.
While classic emo cuts like Paramore’s “Pressure” are a key precursor to Narnia’s sound, those early 2000s bands had a sense of anticipatory doom, of impending emotional collapse, that is absent in the current revival. Instead, the emo music of 2019 is post-apocalyptic; no longer waiting for the bomb to drop, we are crawling through the ashes. Rather than the crisp, sticky hooks of his forebears (think: where is your boy tonight…), Narnia allows melody to overtake lyricism—the post-Future ‘mumble’ of trap transforms into a homesick chant beyond language. This is the bleeding heart of Dashboard Confessional by way of benzos and endless scrolling through Instagram feeds. And there are brilliant moments of contradictory lucidity too: “I love you as you are. So picture perfect,” Narnia croons. Love as perfect as a picture, a faultless .jpeg wallpapering the real you. Here, there is no longer a difference between loneliness and intimacy, as the Internet brings us together in mutual isolation. And obviously, the queen of this new para-social condition could only be Belle Delphine, who smiles unfailingly through our total romantic meltdown.