R. MISSING - Turning Off Lights Is My Destiny

Some albums seek out the night, while others seem to have been born inside it. "Turning Off Lights Is My Destiny" is a dreamy record that takes us back to the golden-era atmospheres of the dream-pop revival that delighted us between the 2000s and 2010s. R. Missing — the enigmatic New York duo made up of Sharon Shy and Henry "Toppy" Frost — build here an electronic pop so cold and estranging it could have come from a distant galaxy.

The title is already a statement of intent: turning off the lights isn't a gesture, it's a calling. Darkness becomes a refuge, an identity, even a form of freedom (the album closes, fittingly, with another striking line, "Darkness, I'll Always Be Your Girl"). And Shy's voice, suspended somewhere between a confession and a late-night radio broadcast, turns every thought into a small ghost.
The album lives in that liminal zone where synth-pop, ethereal-wave, dream-pop and electro-pop stop being categories and simply become sonic temperatures. R. Missing know this language inside out, and bend it toward absence, distance, alienation, bringing to mind both Crystal Castles ("Aliveness So Gently Used") and Pastel Ghost ("Anomie By The Lake"), perhaps the duo's most important influence. The melodies are accessible without becoming complacent, while the beats invite movement even as something inside keeps slowly rotting.

"Turning Off Lights Is My Destiny" doesn't reinvent any of the genres it embraces in its texture, but moves through them with a contemporary sensibility, absorbing the legacy of the Eighties, the Nineties, and the more elegant electro-pop of the 2010s, arriving at something intriguing and personal. A mellow, melancholy and strangely seductive record. A small emotional blackout. And, quite possibly, R. Missing's most fully realized and mature work.

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26/08/2026