Emily Kinski’s Dead`s EP “Dancing On The Battlefield”

Imagine yourself back in the 80s, at LIMELIGHT, the Gothic disco in London housed in a converted Presbyterian church. “Temple Of Love” by The Sisters Of Mercy has just blasted from the speakers, preceded by “Love Like Blood” by Killing Joke and “Shadowplay” by Joy Division. And you wonder, what could possibly come next?

Then a song plays that you’ve never heard before, one you couldn’t have heard because it’s from the future, specifically from 2024, yet it sounds as if it belongs right there and then. You stay on the dance floor, feeling the song, dancing, sensing a sadness because it can’t be real. Afterwards, you approach the DJ, though it’s always a bit awkward, and ask him what track that was. He shows you a vinyl record labeled: Emily Kinski’s Dead: Dancing On The Battlefield.

There’s no internet to search for the band, but even if there were, you wouldn’t find them. You ask at music magazines and record shops, both of which still existed back then, but no one knows the band. All you get passed under the counter is a VHS tape with a video of “Dancing On The Battlefield”: a hypnotically beautiful woman named EMILY, cool, angry, walking into a brutalist concrete building, encountering a vain manager playing chess for the world. Of course, the manager doesn’t play himself but lets the devil choose his moves, while the chessboard on the huge table is so far from Emily that she has to climb onto it to make a move.

Almost forty years later, this song is released. Limelight has long since closed, but now everything is back, just like the Cold War you thought would never return. And now you also understand the lyrics of the song, about which songwriter Thome Kowa says: “Dealing with climate change is so frustrating that we had to address it in DANCING ON THE BATTLEFIELD. Of course, there’s no happy ending here either, but at least we slam a big FUCK OFF in the face of the fossil fuel industry.”

So you listen to the EP, starting with a genuine 12″ maxi version of “Dancing On The Battlefield”, recorded just like they did in the 80s. After that you find yourself inside the mind of a serial killer with “Why Can`t You Love Me?”, lose yourself in the beauty of the Minimoog solo in “Cold Comfort”, only to end up on the dance floor again with the single version of “Dancing On The Battlefield”. You want more and, for once, you’re in luck because the album “Black Light District” will follow in October ’24.

Emily Kinski‘s dead @ Web

Emily Kinski‘s dead Live