True Deceiver is Wish Lash’s first full length, recorded during a residency at Calgary’s National Music Centre in 2019. Created using the NMC’s collection of vintage synthesizers, the album combines analog generated sound and software synthesis, crafting stratified textures of digital and hardware production. Warm, spacious layers of low, droning synths mingle with airy beats and hushed vocal melodies, conjuring a charged, melancholic atmosphere. Showcasing the sonic depth of analog sound design and expanding upon the somnolent vocals and hypnotic rhythms of 2018’s Altar of Doubt, as well as the instrumental electronica of last year’s Chaos Choir, True Deceiver is an expansive new step in Wish Lash’s evolving artistic approach.

The release exudes a hazy, seraphic allure exemplified by the eerie, dynamic “Fast Boy,” a sonic enclosure of deep kick drums and breathy vocals summoning a pleasurable, dark idyll. Ghostly processed vocals float over stripped-down, dry kicks on “Strange Country,” followed by the quietly anthemic “Cyberromantics,” driven by bass arpeggios and sibylline vocals. “Neon Milk” is ambrosial and darkly urgent, propelled by syncopated rhythms and shadowy atmospherics. The enveloping presence and hushed beats that lend True Deceiver its cohesive sound is typified by “Lonely Among The Sleepers,” with its murmuring vocals and mesmeric percussion. Dreamy, halcyon, and stimulating, this debut album is a leap forward for Wish Lash, consolidating a unique musical sensibility that is both restorative and transporting.

- Kayla Guthrie

Nothing

Holy Select

Ordinary Time

Lonely Among the Sleepers

Neon Milk

Cyberromantics

Strange Country

Fast Boy

Losing Earth

Off Hour

To the Hilt

Wish Lash

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