CLUBDRUGS - Lovesick

In the underbelly of American cities there's a musical ecosystem that seems to exist outside of time: that's where the language of Clubdrugs was born. "Lovesick", the debut album by the Chicago duo made up of Maria Reichstadt and John Regan, sounds tailor-made for exactly that kind of space, an underground dancefloor where nostalgia and emotional disorientation blur into one another until they become indistinguishable.

In recent years the band has been moving quickly through the North American alternative underground. First came a run of singles that made the rounds of the darkwave scene, then the 2025 tour with Iamx — an almost ritual rite of passage for many new names in the goth-electronic scene. From there came the signing to Artoffact, a label that in recent years has become a reference point for the new generation of post-punk and industrial acts. "Lovesick" thus arrives carrying a certain weight of expectation: not so much as a viral phenomenon, but as a possible new node in the network of contemporary darkwave.

The album moves within recognisable but fairly elastic territory. The result isn't a straightforward revivalist exercise, but rather a kind of artificial nostalgia for a sound that recalls the alternative Nineties while reflecting them through colder digital surfaces, indissolubly tied to the 80's.

The production, handled by Reichstadt and Regan themselves and polished in the mix by Maurizio Baggio (Boy Harsher, Soft Moon, Male Tears, Nuovo Testamento), works hard on texture. The drum machines pulse with minimal precision while the synths stack up like a luminous fog. The guitars, often submerged in reverb, only surface now and then, like shapes glimpsed inside a smoke-filled room.

"Bloodfeast" immediately sets the record's emotional tone. The rhythm is almost euphoric, but underneath that dancing surface runs something more unsettled. With "Heart 2 Break" (probably the album's most recognisable track), Clubdrugs instead lean into the goth-rock side of their identity. It's a song that neatly demonstrates the band's strategy: building pop hooks inside dark soundscapes.

As the album moves into its middle section, the sound expands towards more atmospheric territory. It's no coincidence that after "Pretty (Anna's Song)" — forged from a venomous synth spiral — "Overdose" slows the pulse right down, turning into a kind of melancholy trance. Here the shoegaze component surges to the fore: synths and guitars merge into a diffuse, more immersive wall of sound, exactly as happens on the following "Disappear".

The closing "Suffer" is the album's most ambitious moment. The track opens on a minimal bed, before slowly sliding into an even darker, more reverb-drenched landscape. When the guitars explode in the final section, the song morphs into something closer to alternative rock than plain darkwave. It's the point where the band seems to glimpse broader possibilities ahead.

It must be said that eight tracks (the record runs twenty-five minutes, if we exclude the digital edition, which adds an ambient version of the same songs as a bonus) fly by fast, and some ideas (especially in the second half) barely seem to have time to emerge before the record is over. More room might have let the band better explore the tension between its pop side and its more atmospheric one. Still, "Lovesick" works well enough as an effective introduction to the world of Clubdrugs: after all, that's exactly the album's appeal, designed to survive within the scene rather than change it.

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09/04/2026