Dangerous Days

Dangerous Days is the only record in this index you could dance to, and its inclusion here is a deliberate argument about what horror music is for.

Kent came out of French black metal and arrived at synthwave with a metal musician's attitude to volume and a metal musician's indifference to subtlety. The result is not the warm, nostalgic, sunset-and-Lamborghini register that most of the genre operates in. Dangerous Days is cold, hard, loud and aggressive: saw-wave leads with no reverb to hide behind, bass that is closer to industrial than to disco, gated snares, and arpeggios that run past the point of pleasure into something closer to pressure.

The frame is a cyberpunk city — the record is presented as a set of transmissions from a dystopia, with sampled dialogue, corporate announcements and a general atmosphere of a place that has already lost. It is not a subtle conceit and Kent is not attempting subtlety. What he is attempting is the specific thing Blade Runner, Terminator and early Carpenter did with synthesisers: making technology sound like a predator.

Why it belongs in a horror index

Because the lineage is direct and because the mechanism is the same. The pulsing synth menace that Carpenter built on Halloween (OST) and Escape from New York is the thing this record is doing at four times the tempo, and Kent's sound has since fed back into horror itself — the modern Carpenter-indebted score, the neon-slasher revival, and a great deal of game and film music that wants a threat with a BPM. Dangerous Days is where that became a formal language rather than a pastiche.

The best tracks

"Humans Are Such Easy Prey" is the record's thesis in a title and is the one most people meet first. "Future Club" is the biggest and the one that broke the album, and it is genuinely enormous. "Sentient" and "Neo Tokyo" are the colder material and the closest Kent gets to dread rather than aggression. Across the record the sequencing alternates between those two modes, which is why an hour of it does not exhaust.

Where it is weaker

It is long and front-loaded, and the back half repeats the first. The sampled dialogue and the dystopian framing are thin and are the element that has dated fastest. And at 060 on tone it is, by a wide margin, the least bleak record in this index — which is a problem if you have come to it from the records either side of it here.

For the score this record is descended from, Halloween (OST) and The Fog (OST); for the modern synth score that applied the same vocabulary to a horror film, It Follows (OST).

The short answer: it ends by cooling down rather than by escalating, which is the one structurally interesting thing about the record. Dangerous Days front-loads its hardest and fastest material and sequences the colder, slower, more atmospheric tracks towards the back, so the album's last stretch is closer to the Carpenter-style dread it is descended from than to the club material it opens with. There is no narrative conclusion to the dystopian framing — the city is not saved or destroyed, and the transmissions simply stop. Kent has released the album in several configurations, including an expanded edition with additional tracks and remixes, so the final track depends on which version you have. What every version does is end quieter than it started.

What is darksynth?

The harder, colder branch of synthwave: analogue-modelled synthesisers and 1980s production conventions used for aggression rather than nostalgia, usually at higher tempos, with distortion, industrial bass and metal-adjacent arrangement. Dangerous Days is the record that defined it, and Perturbator, Carpenter Brut and GosT are the three names the subgenre is usually described through. The distinction from mainstream synthwave is mood rather than equipment.

Who is Perturbator?

James Kent, a French musician who came to synthesisers from black metal and released his first Perturbator records in the early 2010s, mostly through the Blood Music label. Dangerous Days is his breakthrough; The Uncanny Valley followed in 2016, and later records including Lustful Sacraments moved towards post-punk and industrial. He also contributed to the Hotline Miami soundtracks, which is where a large part of his audience found him.

Why is a synthwave record in a horror index?

Because its lineage and its method are horror's. The threatening synthesiser pulse is Carpenter's invention, and this record is that device run at dance tempo with modern production. The influence has also run back the other way: contemporary horror scoring, neon-lit slasher revivals and a great deal of game music take their vocabulary from darksynth rather than from the 1978 original.

Is Dangerous Days actually frightening?

No, and the page should say so plainly. We score it 060 on tone — the least bleak of the records we hold by a clear margin — and 084 on pace, the fastest thing in the whole index. It is menacing, propulsive and cold, and it is fundamentally enjoyable in a way nothing else in this medium here is. It belongs in the index as the point at which horror's synthesiser language became music in its own right.

Where should I start with Perturbator?

Here, with "Humans Are Such Easy Prey" and "Future Club". The Uncanny Valley is the better-produced and more coherent record and is the one to go to next. If you want the colder, slower end of what he does, the later material is where it is, and if you want the context, the Hotline Miami soundtracks are where the whole scene converged.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Pace 084 is the fastest in the index — 104 of 105 works score lower. Most of the record sits at dance tempo and the arpeggios run faster than that.

Tone 060 is the least bleak score we hold in this medium — 102 works score lower. The record is aggressive rather than despairing, and large parts of it are a straightforward pleasure.

Era bias 088 reads modern — 91 works score lower, which is worth stating given the record's 1980s vocabulary: everything on it is modern software and modern mastering imitating analogue, not analogue.

The threat at 070 leans human — 85 works score lower. The record's imagined antagonists are corporations, machines and people, and there is nothing supernatural in its frame.

Viscera 055 is above the median — 67 works score lower. Nothing is described, but the bass and the distortion are physical, and the record is mixed to be felt.

Reality anchor 066 leans towards dream logic — 74 works score lower, almost entirely because of the dystopian framing rather than anything in the music's structure.

On shocks: none. Everything on it is signposted a bar in advance, which is what makes it danceable.