After a teenhood spent playing in hardcore punk bands, Real Lies took pills at a party for the first time, and moved to London. Since 2011, they have been trying to synthesise that feeling over and over again, hidden away in the arch of a Zone 3 railway bridge. Staring down at them from the walls of the studio have been three pictures: an image of a young Sasha Shulgin in the relief print style of Camden Market Che Guevara T-shirts, the magical one-eyed rabbit prophet ‘Frank’ from Donnie Darko, and a photo of an orbiter fairground ride in flight, taken sometime in the early 2000s. “We’ve seen your gigantic flying light show whales, and heard your gong bath ‘rave’ albums,“ says lyricist Kevin Lee Kharas, who writes all of his songs while walking around London in the rain at night. “We’ve seen your Keinemusik videos, and streamed your Giza Pyramid DJ sets. Electronic music is in its prog rock era… It doesn’t feel like anything anyone ever wanted.” Real Lies (who are Kharas and producer Patrick King) describe their new music as a “beautiful trance revenge fantasy”, a night bus fever dream of assembling a street gang of late-night dreamers (some living, some dead) known as “The Birds” to take on the amassed forces of “The Grids” – terminally online alpha male misanthropes, narcissist influencers, morality police, bougie fusspots, Gulf hyper-capitalists, the so-called ‘Nerd Reich’, time, the markets, the algorithms, the dull, the twee, and the boring.

Real Lies

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