Leeds rockers VENUS GRRRLS delve into the darker corners of romanticism on ‘Mother Knows’, the first taste of their newly announced EP To Die as Lovers May, due for release on October 16 via Killabop. Inspired by the enduring myth that Mary Shelley once had sex on her mother’s grave, the track intertwines passion, death and Frankenstein-inspired imagery with a sound that pulls together decades of gloriously dark rock music.
A huge, grungy guitar riff hooks you in immediately, while GK’s commanding vocal ensures she remains every bit its equal. Doomy drums stalk through the verses as ‘Mother Knows’ moves effortlessly between the swagger of classic 70s rock, the shadows of 80s goth and the grit of 90s grunge. But its most spine-tingling moment arrives during the bridge, when guitarist Eliza Lee swaps the conventional approach for a violin bow. “I’ve always loved the haunting effect you can get with a violin bow that I don’t really think you can replicate with gadgetry,” she explains. “It felt like the right move for the graveyard ambience of the song.” She’s absolutely right; the resulting sound is genuinely eerie, sending a shiver down the spine and pushing the track even further into its macabre world.
The accompanying visualiser keeps things comparatively simple, capturing VENUS GRRRLS performing together while their goth-rock aesthetic and formidable presence do the rest. Yet ‘Mother Knows’ practically begs for an entire cinematic world to be built around it – preferably after dark, amongst crumbling headstones in an appropriately mist-covered graveyard. For a band already adept at drawing upon gothic literature, film and imagery without allowing those influences to become empty aesthetics, ‘Mother Knows’ feels completely at home. VENUS GRRRLS don’t simply borrow from gothic rock; they seem to instinctively understand what makes it so intoxicating in the first place.
