Album Review: Warfield - Deathrock Devotionals Vol. 1

A thirty-year arc from a psychedelic hip-hop debut (My Field Trip to Planet 9, 1993) to the black-suited, synth-seductive hauteur of She Wants Revenge, Justin Warfield's songs always move with minimal parts, maximal voltage, and a baritone trained to set groove to image. Deathrock Devotionals Vol. 1, the opening installment of his solo project WARFIELD, is brisk proof that he always preferred the shortest route to the nerve ending. Five tracks that treat acceleration as aesthetic, memory as fuel, and Los Angeles as both cemetery and arcade. On September 19, Control welcomes WARFIELD to Bucharest.

WARFIELD is a true solo record and road vehicle with a serial rollout that promises further “devotionals” and a touring map dotting the globe. But none of this scaffolding would matter if the music didn’t flash. These songs triangulate early-80s L.A. deathrock, classic British alt melancholia and the aerodynamic edges of modern darkwave, all with a decidedly late-70s/early-80s L.A. aesthetic, where the camera flash of Edward Colver meets the macabre.

The influence grid is legible: framed by hints of Kommunity FK and Siouxsie. There's early Christian Death and Super Heroines in the tempo, and Killing Joke and Skeletal Family in its sinew. The Damned and Xmal Deutschland pop up in the guitars, all while the Smiths and New Order hum underneath the hood. The writing, however, is terser than homage, and the arrangements resist simple cosplay with its hooks arriving hard and clean.

If there’s a governing thread, it’s motion as devotion, constructing Deathrock Devotionals Vol. 1 from five scenes of velocity staged with different masks. “All The Fun (Kiss, Kiss, Kiss)” lays down the catechism, establishing the project's grammar. It turns the title into something joyously uptempo, high-contrast, and cleverly reductive.

That same propulsion mutates across the set. “Jet Plane” literalises lift-off with runway-low end, fuselage-treble, and a shamelessly kinetic chorus in the EP's most propulsive cut. If the B-52s met the Pretenders while dancing in a Manchester warehouse, you'd probably get something like this.

“Distraction” channels the adrenaline laterally. The guitars are grainier here, the synths less lacquered. You also notice how he uses negative space to create a sensation of someone thinking three moves ahead while dancing in the present.

Even the slower work keeps faith with the pace. “Whispers for the Dead” features toms soft-shoeing, guitar tails blooming into reverbed chiaroscuro, its images (clove smoke, condensation, last-call laughter) saturating without smothering. The songwriting leans into an older L.A. spectrality with less nightclub seduction and more alleyway theatre. The EP's mood piece is where the devotional conceit lands as a ritualised attention to tone.

Closer “Get Away/Far Away” reframes the thesis as flight rather than chase. Its sky-facing hook with a faint surf tilt in the tremolo, held tight by the rhythm section, is an escapist fantasy written by someone who knows that no matter the scenery, the self follows.

Part of why the EP snaps is the technique accrued across decades and redeployed without sentiment. Before the black-suit seductions of his best-known band, WARFIELD learned syllabic economy in rap. Lines land like jump cuts. Images arrive with a DJ's logic. Choruses feel engineered for rooms, not algorithms. The playing follows suit: guitars cut rather than curdle; synths underline rather than occlude; drums prize articulation over density.

So what, specifically, does Vol. 1 do? It consolidates WARFIELD's past lives—rap cyphers, UK charts, American cable TV (American Horror Story: Hotel), L.A. deathrock velocity, British alt fatalism—into a blitzed and properly enjoyable grammar that reads as the first draft of something brisker. It refuses mausoleum instincts in favour of pace and air. In a year crowded with well-mannered mood pieces, these five songs sound indecently alive.