Stockholm-based electronic artist Me & Melancholy – the project of musician and producer Peter Ehrling – returns with FEM., delivering his most personal, contrasting and emotionally raw album to date. Blending dark electro, melancholic synthpop, industrial rhythms and post-punk tension, the result is a work that illuminates identity, the loss of self and the fragile architecture of human relationships with surgical precision. Ehrling writes, produces and masters everything himself – thereby creating a soundscape that simultaneously glitters, aches and breathes.

‘Dance With Me’ sparks the initial impulse and draws a magnetic line through the entire album – an electric fissure that digs deeper with every dark beat, shaping the space into which ‘Lost In You’ descends immediately afterwards – a cycle of emptiness and mistrust that feels like a narrowing labyrinth. ‘Broken Souls’ turns its gaze to the fine lines of inner scars, carried by a minimalist soundscape that renders every wound visible like a precise mark, before ‘All Of You’ merges pain and intimacy, and cinematic synth pads create an atmosphere in which every emotion seems greater and more vulnerable. ‘Reputation’ lays bare the perfect façade behind which emptiness lurks, and traces this illusion with cool, surgical dark-electro elements, whilst ‘Squidso’ drifts into self-alienation and the driving synth-pop beat attempts to hold the crumbling core together with movement. ‘The One I Am’ raises a silent cry for self-determination, carried by dark synth-pop textures that seem like an inner glow, followed by ‘All Love Is Gone’, which takes a sober look at the definitive end of a relationship and uses clear structures to frame the heavy truth. ‘Just Like The Sun’ bridges the gap between redemption and dependence, danceable and eerie at the same time, whilst ‘No Permission’ formulates a manifesto against control, raw and unwavering in its melancholic dark electro. Finally, ‘Ghosts In The Mirror’ closes the album with a glimpse into the inner abyss; slow, depressive electronic sounds make one’s own demons audible and make the finale feel like a mirror that can no longer be avoided.

FEM. is an album that doesn’t set out to please, but rather to be true. A work that shows just how intimate, vulnerable and literary electronic music can be – and how synths, beats and vocals become mirrors in which you don’t always recognise yourself, but always find yourself again.

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