“ghostdown” is the first thing we’re hearing from Midgriefs‘ upcoming album Signs of Laughter, out August 18th, and it lands as a fitting introduction, a track built around the struggle of holding onto a light that’s barely there while the dark keeps pressing in. Bermuda-based Midgriefs has described the project as down-to-earth yet also alien, and that duality is exactly what “ghostdown” captures, lo-fi textures rubbing up against something more experimental and unsettled underneath.
The song’s textures genuinely sound like sleep deprivation itself, hazy and unstable in a way that’s less about any single unsettling sound and more about the overall blur of it. It’s psychedelic and atmospheric in that specific sense, the kind of disorientation that comes from being awake too long rather than anything overtly trippy, everything slightly smeared at the edges. That quality suits the song’s subject matter well, since holding onto hope while exhausted and surrounded by shadow is very much a sleep-deprived kind of feeling, worn down but still stubbornly upright.
Production here comes from Alex Thompson, whose past work with Dijon and Crumb tracks with the kind of textured, slightly off-center sound “ghostdown” is going for, and drummer Lia Braswell, who plays alongside Chelsea Wolfe elsewhere, contributes to roughly half the album, adding a physical backbone that keeps the atmosphere from floating away entirely. Between that rhythm section and Thompson’s production sensibility, there’s a real tension on this track between grounded and unmoored, which seems to be the whole point of the project.
As a lead single, “ghostdown” does its job well, setting up Signs of Laughter’s stated territory: alienation, death, and a hope that can be felt more than seen, without giving away too much of what the rest of the record has in store. It’s an eerie, immersive way into an album that sounds like it’s asking listeners to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it quickly.
