London-based art-pop singer-songwriter Oliver Marson today releases new EP ‘Into The Darkness’ via High Road Records, led by new single and EP title track, ‘Into The Darkness’.
“This song was the initial spark for the EP,” Marson explains regarding the title track. “A bit like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it explores and confronts the misguided emotions that followed this personal catastrophe. The artwork, a burning house, visually represents the broken place from which this music emerged – a feeling of losing the only person I knew amidst a world that felt like it was ending.”
Draping noirish pop arrangements and bruised crooner vocals in smoke and shadow, the EP pulls Marson’s sound somewhere between a haunted cabaret and woozy synth-led balladry.
Marson’s independently released 2023 full length ‘Why Did I Choose This?’ examined the grotesqueries of British modern life through satirical detachment. This new era is a move inward – with the ‘Into The Darkness’ EP instead reckoning with the existential confusion that arose in the aftermath of a breakup, as Marson explains:
“While the EP originates from a place of desperation, the process of creating it became an act of transfiguration of the soul and an internal healing of these emotional demons. The EP is about the raw act of exposing myself, embracing vulnerability, and being utterly honest with my feelings. My aim was to transform this darkness into something beautiful. There is a part of myself that only truly comes alive when I’m making music. That is where I find the value, and it’s in the creative process that I can fully tap into and express the rawest, most vulnerable, and sometimes darkest corners of my being.”
‘Into The Darkness’ threads together themes of tech obsession, identity dissolution, and gothic romance, with tracks tackling whistleblowing, collapsing systems, and deluded self-help culture, all exploring what it means to lose control in a world obsessed with performance – delivered with the off-kilter noir glamour of London after dark.
Lyrically, Marson drew from his gothic literary heroes – Byron, Baudelaire, Keats – blending their romantic darkness with sonic cues from Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Cave, and Jack Ladder, the result is one of Marson’s most richly textured works yet.
The opening track ‘Whistleblower’ introduces the EP with a sense of mounting paranoia and dread. The mood deepens on ‘Madeline’, a smoky, vampiric duet with Jessica Winter that plunges into the claustrophobia and self-annihilation of obsessive love. From there, ‘Jeremy’ offers a synth-flecked moment of goth-pop grandeur, before the EP descends into its deceptively buoyant closing statement, title track ‘Into The Darkness’.
Oliver Marson is an artist in continual motion, restlessly shaping and reshaping his world. ‘Into The Darkness’ is another clear, compelling step forward.
Oliver Marson’s new EP ‘Into The Darkness’ is out now, released 13th November via High Road Records.