To understand Death Mask, the latest release from Death in Vegas, you first have to rewind, not just through their discography, but through time itself. Somewhere between the post-grunge comedown and the rise of nu metal, there was a brief but unique era known as “big beat.” It was electronic music with muscle. Obviously, it was beat-driven, but it was also expansive, ambitious, and full of sonic risk.
The Chemical Brothers and Underworld waxed electronica. Fatboy Slim and early Daft Punk brought it to the dance floor. Air and Groove Armada slowed it down, wrapping breakbeats in ambient haze and velvet jazz. Standing slightly apart from the more prominent names, darker and more haunted, stood Death in Vegas.
While others chased ecstasy, Death in Vegas offered something closer to exorcism. Their early records, Dead Elvis, The Contino Sessions, and Scorpio Rising, form a jagged trilogy of distorted guitars, analog synths, and spectral atmospheres. This was big beat, but dirtier and more gothic. The music was less about the high and more about the ache. With Satan’s Circus, the band shed that particular sound entirely, pivoting toward minimalism and mechanized tension. That era’s Lovecraft-meets-Kraftwerk sensibility carried forward in 2011’s Trans-Love Energies and 2016’s Transmission.
Nearly a decade later, the return of Death in Vegas feels less like a comeback and more like a reckoning.
Operating now as the one-man ritual of Richard Fearless, guitar hooks and feral bass have been replaced with icy synth and samples of static and feedback. If the group’s opening album trilogy was the rave and the next three were the after party, Death Mask is the walk home in the encroaching half-light of the soon-coming dawn as your thoughts turn darker. It’s a record sculpted from shadows, unflinching in its desolation, beautiful in its bleakness.
We begin with “Chingola,” a hushed swell of synthetic strings and ghostly textures. It’s not an intro but a birth. We are in a womb. This is a soul awakening in silence and fog, emerging like breath in cold air. Ruminations on life, death, and what’s beyond, are sewn into the album. Death Mask is easily the most personal record in Fearless’ career.
The album exists, like grief or memory, humming at the edge of perception.
Sonically speaking, Death Mask sees Fearless drawing from the low-end dread of Sunn O))), the echo-chamber dub of King Tubby, the ghost circuitry of Detroit techno, and the frostbitten dissonance of Scandinavian noise. What we’re left with is a collection of songs acting as various states. Liminal, murky, half-remembered. It doesn’t seduce or explain. It just is.
On paper, the record come across as an ambient soundtrack. But make no mistake, these songs are ready for the club. You will need an open mind, but the beats are still there. “Lovers” stumbles like it’s searching for its own heartbeat; “Robin’s Ghost” pulses with the clinical terror of ICU machines. “Róisín Dub(h)” is panicked, slowed, and submerged. While “Your Love” offers a single breath of strobe-lit hallucination acid-house bliss, it slips back into a haunting silence.
Death Mask is not designed to charm.
It’s dense, unwelcoming, and fiercely indifferent to streaming-era convenience. In that resistance, it becomes something more sacred. Like an act of artistic devotion and maybe even defiance. It’s a sonic memento or meditation on the threshold between life and loss, love and oblivion.
A hallmark of Death In Vegas records used to be the guest vocalist. Everyone from Iggy Pop, Hope Sandoval, to Liam Gallagher and even Sasha Grey has stepped up to the mic. In their stead, Death Mask has replaced vocals with suggestion. Each track seems to ask: “What remains after the end? What echoes after the body cools, after the lights go out, after the voice falls silent?”
Within that void, Death In Vegas offers a kind of resurrection.
Fearless doesn’t just chronicle death; he explores what lingers after. The loops don’t fade; they haunt. The static doesn’t stop; it speaks in code. Despite being an instrumental electronic album, the alien soundscapes feel as if they’re about continuation. About persistence. The way emotion and memory outlive form and art, like a soul refusing to leave the room. It’s the sound of someone still creating in the aftermath, long after the signal should’ve gone dead. No big beat, choruses, or resurrection in the traditional sense. Just a quiet, fearless insistence that, even in death and grief, something beautiful remains.
Death Mask is available on Drone.