Harbinger is the fourth single from Nashville darkwave duo Mourning Candle. It's a song that arrives without compromise. Confrontational, and political, the track stands as their blunt “F**k ICE” statement, a challenge to the notion that goth and dark electronic music should remain detached from real-world violence.
Rooted in goth-electro but sharpened with industrial rock edges, Harbinger fuses pulse and protest into something volatile and necessary. The song confronts injustice, authoritarianism, and inherited historical trauma with a sense of urgency that refuses subtlety. Its tension fractures midway through a blistering guitar solo, drawing from composer/guitarist Anson Taylor’s black metal background in Vatican.
“When I was writing this song, I fell in love with the Ignite Emissary amp sim/plug-in,” Taylor says. “It has such a good sound for its default settings. I didn’t really change much besides adding a tube screamer capture to give it a good, hard crunch, and little delay and reverb to help ‘fatten’ it up a bit more.”
Harbinger is direct and unflinching, crying out against systemic injustice and the erosion of truth.
“This is our poetic retaliation against ICE and the current administration, whose actions sickeningly remind me of the beginning of Holocaust that my grandparents lived through in Germany.”
Despite its fury, the song remains focused and sharp, as the aggression never overwhelms the songwriting and the track's deep concept.
“The best advice anyone has ever given me as far as songwriting is, ‘think like a songwriter, not a guitar player,’” says Taylor. “It’s just like creating any other piece of art. It has to breathe, it has to flow, it has to be able to tell its own story without getting choked.”
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Mourning Candle
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