The keen reader might remember Italian producer and visionary _SHOE from a feature we published earlier this year, celebrating ‘Lace Entaglement’ as a “synthwave-laden anthem”, a definition that’s partly also true for the whole project, constantly oscillating between synthetic escapism and new wave guitar-driven melancholia. Standing as ‘Synthetic High-Output Efficiency’, _SHOE is not your average musical outfit. It’s an audio-visual body of work, with the Italian creative busy working on an overarching transmedia project, ‘Devisal’.
For now, though, we should probably direct our attention towards ‘Patterns of Possession’, _SHOE’s sophomore album. In it, we can appreciate the many nuances that make the project such a haunting and vibrant entity. Collecting past singles and brand new offerings, ‘Patterns of Possession’ moves with a certain lo-fi and industrial flair, pairing brighter synthwave efforts with darkwave, intense pieces (‘The Mission’ comes to mind).
Upon such aural goodness lies an even more prominent theme, the lyrical one, with _SHOE busy building a fictional dimension in which artificial intelligence takes control of everything around us. As the Italian artist explains: “The album’s core themes are directly tied to the Devisal storyline: control, the loss of self, code as virus and deity, the Adepts, and the enigmatic figure of Attilio Leone.” The record also benefits from Stefano Francescato on vocals and Matteo Martini on guitars.
Recommended! Discover ‘Patterns of Possession’ on Spotify:
