The Somnambulist, the debut album from Lunar & The Deception, showcases a goth-leaning rock which is imbued with a good dash of the anthemic. Take the album’s third track “Your Monsters”: while strings swirl through a guitar-based chug, the choruses are uplifting – lighters beg to be held aloft in accompaniment. Big stuff, stadium ready too and like a rockier analogue of Finland’s ever-potent HIM. If genre categorisation is needed for The Somnambulist, darkwave fits the bill.
Lyrically, over its crisp 33 minutes, The Somnambulist is concerned with the lies permeating international networks of communication, how people are suppressed by corporations and repressed by societal norms. Somnambulism is a result. The search for material gratification is not a good thing. “Money can’t sustain us” declares the lyrics of the eastern Mediterranean-tinged closing track “We Looked the Other Way.” The title of third track “Ezeru Kazpam” has the bracketed suffix “The Curse of Money.” All this is couched in mystical terminology linking the search for self-determination to embracing nature and the powers embedded in natural landscapes and pre-Christian edifices. The spirit of Venus is invoked.
The creators of this intoxicating, sometimes suffocating, stew are Lunar & The Deception, a London-based four-piece fronted by Britt Xyra Dusk, who has previously recorded as both Britt Foe and Britt Cormack. In the world of design, fashion and styling, she has worked as Britt Seel: amongst her credits are television’s After Life, Bridgerton and Holby City, and the fashion brand Marla. Drummer Hedge Seel – presumably a relative – also records solo under the HP Lovecraft-inspired name Necromonica and has been a member of the goth/industrial/metal outfit Tribazik. The guitarist is Thomas Hammond and the bassist is Greg Chapter. Beyond these core members, guest players appear on the album.
Judging by The Somnambulist’s credits and the attendant imagery, Britt is the driver of the band: it is her alone pictured on the sleeve at the South African megalithic site Inzalo y’Langa. The album is Lunar and co’s first physical release since 2015’s debut EP New Moon. A few tracks have appeared through digital-only outlets in the intervening period, but The Somnambulist has taken a long time to arrive. No matter. An album for the preternatural lurking within all of us.
