She Past Away, the Turkish duo of Volkan Caner and Doruk Öztürkcan, have long been masters of atmosphere. Their hybrid of post-punk and darkwave drips with the same cinematics that fueled the genre’s progenitors. But their 2019 album, Disko Anksiyete, is no mere throwback. Its anxious energy mirrors the world it inhabits. On March 26, 2025, She Past Away brings this darkwave magic back to Control Club.
There is something relentless in how these songs move, an unbroken rhythm of doom and seduction. Caner’s voice sings in an incantatory murmur. His Turkish lyrics recount memories of post-human nostalgia through the universal vernacular of emotional resonance. The title itself sets the stage for the album's defining contradictions: dancefloor euphoria tempered by existential weight. Thus, it's not an album about just dancing but doing so at the edge of the abyss.
She Past Away’s influences are clear. The vocals echo Clan of Xymox; the synths and guitars recall The Sisters of Mercy in their Floodland era (with a touch of Turkish fatalism); the locked-in rhythms pulse of Holygram. But unlike the theatrical anguish of these icons and contemporaries, She Past Away let their emotion seep through the cracks without spilling over.
Rhythmically, Disko Anksiyete is monolithic. Some songs lean into trance-like repetition, while others coil like smoke in a dead nightclub. Its eponymous track perfectly exemplifies this, pushing forward like a nervous heartbeat while synths shimmer with a phantasmagoric detachment.
La Maldad shifts into Spanish with an almost new-wave inflection. It marks the first time She Past Away has recorded in a language other than Turkish. In doing so, they bridge their sound into the multilingual gothic underground, aligning themselves with acts like Lebanon Hanover.
Elsewhere, the album sinks further into desolation. Songs like Izole and Renksiz are solitude studies built with skeletal arrangements. The slow burn of Sonbahar laments, while Girdap (or "whirlpool") aptly describes its spiraling unease. By the time Agit (Elegy) arrives, Disko Anksiyete has descended into oblivion in a moment of mournful acceptance.
Disko Anksiyete doesn’t so much break new ground for She Past Away as it polishes it. The harsher edges of Belirdi Gece (2012) have been traded for movement-driven paranoia. The trade-off is tighter energy with less spectral drift and more hypnotic movement. She Past Away has always been a band interested in deepening the shadows they have already cast, and Disko Anksiyete does it with club-ready precision.
