Jon Darc has been circling Berlin’s queer underground for years, staging performances that feel closer to ritual than to concerts. Their background in theater bleeds into every gesture: fashion as armor, lyrics as confession, visuals as extensions of sound. Morast, their new EP, arrives September 12 and pulls all those strands into a concentrated statement about desire, shame, and survival in the city’s nightlife.
Darc calls the music “vampire pop,” but it’s less a genre tag than a provocation. “Addicted to Attention” sets the tone with gunshot samples, camera shutters, and synths that blur between runway glam and breakdown. “k€€p th€ chang€” strips away romance from a sex work encounter, leaving behind intimacy that feels transactional yet strangely tender. “Alien Porn” is the harshest cut, a litany of four-letter words layered against industrial FX until language itself breaks down.
The EP isn’t built for clubs so much as the hours after, when sweat dries and the city feels hollow. “Ambrosia” and “Porcelain” twist religious language and kink into something sticky and distorted, while “Heroin(e)” drifts toward dependency that feels narcotic rather than erotic. The closer, “ily (y?),” is the most naked moment: a sparse piano piece where Darc dissects conditional love, from family rejection to romantic gaslighting.
Produced with Moritz Hofbauer, Jimi Joel Eyrich, and Jordan Lawlor. It thrives in discomfort, in exposing what’s supposed to stay hidden. It’s an EP about bodies and power, but also about release: music that feels like walking home through Berlin at dawn, unsure whether you’ve lost something or found it.
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