VIOLENTENE 🇨🇦 — Victims Of Light EP Review
Review by Infectious Unease Radio / Subterranean Zone Radio — Voice In The Void
Written by Gordon Lawrence Taylor
Artist: Violentene
Country: Canada 🇨🇦
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 🇨🇦
Release: Victims Of Light
Format: EP
Release Date: 27 March 2026
Genre / Style: Darkwave / Synthpop / New Wave / Dreampop / Goth / Synthwave / Alternative
Members: Mvrijo — vocals, lyrics / Roland M — synth, guitar, instruments, programming
Produced + Mixed by: Violentene at Digital Zen Studio, Ottawa
Mastering: Bryan Lowe, Carvalho Mastering
Art + Design: Stephen Seto
Photos: V Laporte, C Boisvert, R Marckwort
VIOLENTENE 🇨🇦 — Victims Of Light: A Beautiful Descent Through Shadow, Radiance, Memory, and Emotional Freefall
There are releases that simply arrive, and then there are releases that seem to appear from the blue hour — half-lit, half-haunted, carrying the feeling of city glass, distant headlights, late-night movement, and the strange emotional gravity that gathers when beauty and collapse touch the same surface.
Violentene’s Victims Of Light is very much the second kind.
The Ottawa duo of Mvrijo and Roland M have created an EP that feels both polished and vulnerable, widescreen and intimate, synthetic and deeply human. This is darkwave and synthpop with a cinematic pulse, but it is not cold for the sake of being cold. Beneath the icy synth lines, carefully detailed beats, and shadowed melodic architecture, there is a very real emotional body moving through the music. It breathes. It aches. It glows. It disappears into light.
The release marks a clear step forward for Violentene. Their own notes describe the EP as familiar yet refined, confident, melodically icy-cool, and moving between the nostalgic, the melancholic, and the surreal. That description is accurate, but the music itself goes further than genre language can fully hold. Victims Of Light sounds like memory replayed through neon glass — the past returning not as nostalgia alone, but as atmosphere, tension, and emotional reckoning.
Across five tracks, Violentene balance elegance with pressure. The production is clean and spacious, but never empty. Roland M’s synths, guitar textures, instruments, and programming create a world of liquid movement and late-night architecture, while Mvrijo’s vocals drift through the centre like a ghost with a pulse. Her voice does not force itself into the songs. It haunts them from within.
This is one of the strongest qualities of Victims Of Light: the music does not scream for attention. It draws you inward. It lets the shadow widen slowly. It lets the light become dangerous.
Track By Track
1. Beginnings — 01:42
Beginnings opens the EP like a door left slightly ajar. At only 1 minute and 42 seconds, it works almost as an invocation — not a full statement, but a threshold. It prepares the listener for the emotional temperature of the record: cool, suspended, elegant, and quietly wounded.
There is something cinematic in the way this track functions. It does not rush. It does not over-explain. It feels like the first glow of light across an empty city corridor, the moment before the heartbeat starts to move faster. As an opener, it gives Victims Of Light a sense of ritual. We are not simply pressing play. We are entering a space.
2. Savage City — 04:09
Savage City brings the EP into motion. Here, Violentene lean into a darker urban pulse — the kind of track that feels made for night roads, concrete, glass, and emotional distance. The title alone carries that feeling of modern life becoming predatory, but the song does not collapse into aggression. Instead, it glides through danger with style and restraint.
The synth work has that beautiful retro-futurist quality: a nod to the 80s underground, but not trapped inside it. This is not imitation. It is continuation. The beat gives the track body, while the melodies carry a dreamlike sadness above the machinery.
Mvrijo’s vocal presence gives the song its human wound. There is a sense of someone standing inside the city and seeing both its beauty and its cruelty at once. Savage City feels like neon reflected in wet pavement — seductive, but never safe.
3. Other Side Of Eternity — 04:40
Other Side Of Eternity is one of the EP’s most expansive moments. The title itself suggests distance, time, longing, and the impossible search for something beyond the visible world. Musically, it sits beautifully within Violentene’s dream-dark language: melodic, spacious, and full of emotional suspension.
This is where the EP’s widescreen feeling becomes very clear. The arrangement allows the song to stretch, breathe, and unfold. There is melancholy here, but not defeat. The track feels like reaching toward something just beyond the edge of memory — a person, a place, a version of the self that may no longer exist.
The beauty of Violentene is that they understand atmosphere is not decoration. Atmosphere is meaning. In Other Side Of Eternity, the sound itself becomes the emotional narrative.
4. Victims Of Light — 04:02
The title track is the centrepiece, and rightly so. Victims Of Light carries the EP’s central contradiction: light as salvation, light as exposure, light as obsession, light as something that reveals too much.
The official Bandcamp description frames the track as bringing a darker, harder edge that builds steadily before evaporating into bittersweet beauty, with Mvrijo exploring the fringes of emotional breakdown and forces beyond comprehension. That is exactly where the song lives — in that strange place where clarity becomes almost unbearable.
There is a powerful emotional idea inside this track: that we are not only victims of darkness. Sometimes we are victims of what the light shows us. The truth. The collapse. The obsession. The sudden illumination of what we cannot unknow.
Musically, the track moves with confidence. The production is sharp, but it never loses atmosphere. The synths shimmer with tension. The rhythm gives the song direction. The vocal delivery floats above it with an almost spectral calm, as though the song is watching its own breakdown from a distance.
This is dark synthpop at its best — elegant, wounded, melodic, and intelligent.
5. Overcome — 04:06
Overcome closes the EP with a sense of release, but not simple resolution. This is not the bright ending where everything is fixed. It is more mature than that. It feels like survival after emotional weather. The storm has not vanished, but the body is still standing.
As a closing track, Overcome gives Victims Of Light its final human shape. After the city, eternity, obsession, and illumination, there is still the possibility of movement. Not triumph in a cheap sense. Not false hope. Something quieter. Something earned.
The title matters. To overcome is not to erase suffering. It is to pass through it and remain alive.
That is where this EP lands — not in darkness, not in radiance, but in the fragile space between the two.
The Sound
Violentene’s sound on Victims Of Light is beautifully controlled. The EP carries traces of darkwave, synthpop, new wave, dreampop, goth, and synthwave, but the band never allow the record to feel like a checklist of influences. The music has its own emotional fingerprint.
There are subtle nods to 80s underground sounds, but the vision remains modern and forward-looking. The synths have movement and shine, the beats are detailed without becoming cluttered, and the vocals carry that dreamlike, vaporous quality that gives the songs their emotional depth. The press material mentions compatible artists such as Ladytron, Chvrches, Zanias, and Depeche Mode, which gives a useful reference point, but Violentene’s strength is that they do not disappear into those comparisons. They occupy their own blue-lit corridor.
There is also a strong visual identity surrounding this release. The artwork and promotional imagery match the sound perfectly: glass, shadow, blue light, urban distance, closed eyes, motion, and stillness. It feels like music designed not only to be heard, but entered.
The Voice and the Machine
The emotional power of Victims Of Light comes from the contrast between Mvrijo’s vocals and Roland M’s electronic architecture.
Mvrijo’s voice carries a calm intensity. It does not need to dominate the mix because it already has presence. There is a softness there, but also distance, as though the words are arriving from somewhere half-submerged. That gives the songs their haunted beauty.
Roland M’s work is equally important. The synths, guitar, instruments, and programming form the body of the EP — liquid, precise, melodic, and atmospheric. The production feels refined but not sterile. It has depth. It has shape. It allows the songs to breathe while still holding them in tight focus.
Together, the duo create that rare balance: emotional and controlled, nostalgic and modern, dark and luminous.
Final Thoughts
Victims Of Light is a superb release from Violentene — elegant, shadowed, melodic, and beautifully realised. It is an EP of tension and release, of melancholy and radiance, of emotional freefall and quiet survival.
This is music for late nights, glass corridors, empty roads, damaged hearts, and those strange private moments when the past returns in flashes of blue light. It is darkwave with dream in its lungs. Synthpop with a wound beneath the surface. New wave memory refracted through modern sorrow.
Violentene have not simply made a collection of songs. They have built an atmosphere — one that feels cinematic, intimate, and deeply human.
Victims Of Light understands something important: sometimes the light does not save us. Sometimes it exposes us. Sometimes it burns away illusion. Sometimes it leaves us standing there, fragile and awake, forced to see what we have become.
And yet, inside that exposure, there is beauty.
There is shadow.
There is survival.
There is Violentene.
Tracklist
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Beginnings — 01:42
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Savage City — 04:09
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Other Side Of Eternity — 04:40
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Victims Of Light — 04:02
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Overcome — 04:06