Listen to Greg Puciato’s Intensely Emotional Electronic Project, The Black Queen
The Black Queen — a new electronic band featuring The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Greg Puciato, former Nine Inch Nails and Puscifer member Joshua Eustis and former Dillinger, NIN and Kesha tech Steven Alexander — sounds like an intensely emotional project.
To start, in the write-up accompanying the Rolling Stone premiere of The Black Queen’s new song and video “The End Where We Start,” Puciato opens up about the inner turmoil he’s been dealing with the past few years in a very candid manner:
“It is very easy for me to turn into a complete savage,” confesses Puciato in a not particularly shocking admission to anyone who has seen Dillinger Escape Plan live. “I can look around and very quickly want to destroy everything around me. I needed to be able to control that, because I was losing control of that. It was no longer on stage and on record. I had some scares. Some massive panic attacks. Found myself in some situations that I was, in all seriousness, fortunate to come out of alive, or not in jail or in a psych ward,” admits the singer, who lived through a well-publicized psychedelic meltdown in 2012. “I don’t like feeling trapped, or feeling like things in me are trapped. I had these other influences and emotions that were trying to manifest, that I couldn’t fully explore artistically in DEP. . . other deeper things like beauty or sadness or love or lust or hope or depression. . . I feel like I’ve hinted at certain elements in the past that I really got to fully explore, both emotionally and musically, with this release.”
Panic attacks are serious business, as anyone who has been there can attest.
And there’s this bit from the official press release about the music itself:
There’s a really visual soundtrack element to the music. We talked a lot about the feel of ‘80s sci-fi, the sort of ‘used future’ thing where it sounds alien but also familiar and gives you nostalgia for a time you don’t remember ever existing. Stanley Kubrick was a big influence as well.
Listen to “The End Where We Start” and you’ll COMPLETELY understand that “nostalgia for a time you don’t remember ever existing” thing — that’s the perfect way of describing it, and it’s exactly what I love so much about the burgeoning synthwave scene. The keyboards and beats create an atmosphere that brings you to some kind of bizarre neverworld… it just gives you this melancholic longing that you can’t place, like nostalgia deja vu. You’ll also feel the emotion and inner turmoil Puciato is working through; he’s much more expressive here than he is an DEP, which is only fitting given the nature of the music, and it’s fun to hear this side of him. I’ve always loved his clean singing voice and he sounds fantastic here.
Check out the track below. The Black Queen’s debut album Fever Daydream is slated for a late 2015 release, although no exact date has been made public yet.
