Provoker
Mausoleum
YEAR0001
Provoker has the power to make you feel like you’re wandering the grounds of a once-glorious abandoned circus. Posturing as the ringmaster, the LA-based dark-pop trio leads their listeners into curated spaces adorned with vibrant set designs and paid actors helping to furnish their surrealist world. Known for using recoiling acoustics, crystalline synths, and plaintive drum machines, Provoker could write a masterclass on how to build ’80s horror nostalgia into a fully realized sound. On their third album Mausoleum, the group collabed with in-demand producer Kenny Beats to compile 11 growling, harrowing ghost stories. Aptly named, the individual songs play like mini Rob Zombie movies shrouded in slow-rolling mystery and mawkish, eye-linered glamor. Flashes of dancey goth-pop and post-punk distortion weave into lyrically contemporary songs about insecurity, isolation, and the internet’s relationship to how we cope with loss.
Inspired by singer Christian Crow Petty’s time spent holed up in an Echo Park attic, the world of empty walls and liminal spaces evoked on lead single “Another Boy” feels just as haunted by the songwriter’s setting as it does repressed memories of being ditched at junior prom for the jock who laughed at his Robert Smith hair and makeup. The single pushes melodic eeriness into familiar New Order–like bass lines to wistfully capture a rebirthed melodramatic society fueled by anxiety and vacant-eyed existentialism. The following track “Gun2myhead” sees our lost and forlorn protagonist shuffling in front of a funhouse mirror, manifesting there a sort of self-sabotaging revenge plan. The song’s distorted guitar leaps over the melancholic lyrics to produce a disorienting, isolating image moved by that innate human desire to seek out sanity, if not clarity, from the horror of forgetting who you are.
Initiated by “Glow in the Dark,” the final act hides the record’s gore under grand muscularity and sharp storytelling. Where the title track seems like a one-man Baroque play set in a neon graveyard, closer “Replay” tells the tragic story of devotion after death with strobe lights and other flashy visual effects. “Replay it over and over again,” Petty’s smoky vocals sing as the stage is flooded with fog, the song’s core rumination slyly twisted into a call to action for the listener. While their 2021 debut Body Jumper initiated the band’s neo-coldwave sound, and sophomore album Demon Compass spun a chronically obsessed web of memoir, Mausoleum expands the band’s gothic take on twisted fates and haunted mirrors. While not as holistically engulfing as most sci-fi or psychedelic ’70s and ’80s concept albums, Provoker nonetheless achieve a flawless synthesis of another well-articulated fictional goth-babe album.
