karkinoma’s façades has the nervous energy of a record made after the polite version of life stopped working. Dimitri Turlotte made it alone in a home studio, writing, recording, producing, mixing, and mastering the album himself, and that solitude gives the music a strange pressure. Nothing here sounds social. Even the brighter songs seem to be watching the door.
“There’s Something in the Woods” is the clearest entry point into that mood. It begins with strings and a dark, haunted pull, then grows through sustained notes that make the first minutes feel almost frozen in place. Synth sounds begin to change the air, a vocal arrives with a spoken-story flavor, and layered voices spread through the stereo field like figures appearing at the side of the frame. Then the track tears open into gritty guitar, rock and metal force, and a vocal still trying to hold its place inside the noise.
The rest of façades keeps returning to that idea of a surface under pressure. “Runaway” opens with guitar and a brighter feel, almost cheerful after the first track, with a funkier indie-rock groove and vocals that carry a faint sea-shanty tint in the phrasing. It is not relief exactly. It feels like someone smiling too hard. “Façades” moves into synth-pop with heavy snare and vocal pressure, giving the album one of its cleaner shapes, but the title already tells on it. A clean front is still a front.
“Prom Night” makes the album’s artificial light harsher: synth, 4×4 kick, snare, and an 80s tint, with vocals that move around the track in restless shapes. “Unexpected” pushes the percussion and synth forward after an electric guitar start, the playing cleaner and tighter, the vocal further back, almost coating the track from behind. “Little Bitch” opens with heavy snare and a chopped vocal loop, landing in a funky-haunted corner that feels petty, funny, and slightly poisonous. “Wake Up” brings phased keys, groovy bass, and percussion, with a nostalgic drive that does not fully relax.
The album’s history matters because the music keeps acting it out without turning into plain diary writing. Burnout, depression, leaving a job, leaving the city, and rebuilding in rural France sit behind the record, but façades is not just a personal crisis report. It is about the roles people keep wearing after those roles have started to rot. Synth-pop becomes costume. Heavy guitar becomes rupture. Vocal layers become doubles. The strings and virtual orchestration give parts of the album a haunted-film size, but the guitars and percussion keep dragging it back to the body.
That is where façades gets its bite. It does not ask for pity, and it does not clean the room before letting anyone in. It lets the pretty parts, ugly parts, funny parts, and broken parts stand close together. karkinoma makes the mask visible, then keeps moving it until the face underneath stops looking stable.
Sync fit: psychological thriller, surreal series, breakdown scene, dark indie drama, tense end credits.
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