The Australian vocalist/producer is the heart of the new emotional
Darcy Baylis is one of the foremost innovators in underground pop. His influences span the breadth of emo, UK dance, and contemporary trap, though the resulting sound is undeniably original and transcendent. On “April Fools / Benzodiazepines” Baylis offers perhaps his most intimate and understated record so far. Above all, it is the richness of vocal harmony that delivers the emotional weight of this music. Freighted with subtle, heightened vocal doubles, Baylis blends pain with tender conviction. While most of his recent music has been driven by addictive breaks and dance drums, Baylis leaves behind percussion on this track. The heartfelt riff that governs the motion of the song recalls the washed out acoustic work of 90s indie bands like Guided by Voices, while the pop-emo hook transforms the song from a dirge into an anthem, a love letter to a pill that is at once a death note.
A line as simple as, “we’re casualties,” establishes the breakdown of responsibility and identity that winds its way through the track. Death and victimhood entwine with longing, opening on an empty bliss. The haunting refrain “look at the state of us / 11 AM and another dose for us” transforms into, “look at the state of me…” The “me” and the “us” interlink and dissolve in the embrace of the chemical. The pill establishes the architecture of a love triangle even as it dissolves it. In this way, Baylis reveals the benzo as a vector of impersonal death — the dissolution of the subject — but of a warm and sweet death, not the coldness of a closure, but the ambivalent history of a bed, weighted with memories of holding someone, of blacking out again and again.
Writing about drugs, it is easy to lapse into banal statements of hedonistic affirmation or self-righteous disavowal. However, the strength of Baylis’ songwriting lies in his capacity to cultivate uncertainty and indeterminacy outside these bounds, to establish an emotional landscape that is not overwritten by classical tropes of addiction, recovery, or drug-induced romance. Instead, the soft music of the pill emerges as a material in its own right, a raw experience of chemical passion that resists reduction to a typical story of use or abuse. This emerges clearly in the main metaphoric thread of the song, which tethers the image of the benzo to the image of bedsheets; sleep, death, love, and intoxication collapse into a selfsame experience of being-covered-up.
Here, emo revival is not simply about sadness, but about building a positive language to communicate love through brokenness. There is no hollowness here, only the fullness of an open heart that is not even sure it is its own. Intimacy is a casualty of motion, being wrapped in bedsheets, waking up in the middle of the night for more pills, lying next to someone for so long that the bodies become indistinct, a longing for the kind of continuity that is already a collapse. “Cause it’s motion,” he sings, letting the wishes and the pains run down and pool together like rain.