DARKSIDE - NOTHING

The darkness isn’t all heavy—it’s fragile, easily broken by light. As a band, The Darkness bring their work well into the light with the 2025 release, Nothing. The scene is set with the opening track, “SLAU.” Throbbing tones and steamy eruptions transport the listener to a train platform. Axles pump, steam rises, and we walk through a machine-made cloud, searching for our locomotive, searching for our companion, our car number, hidden in a haze along with any logical reason. We’re leaving everything we thought we knew on the platform before boarding. Halfway through the track, a railway worker’s voice booms across the loudspeaker, providing no guidance, other than to reinforce that we need to leave our preconceived notions of travel behind now.

Stepping up into the carriage offers a bit more structure to our journey, as track 2, “S.N.C.,” sets up a more regular rhythm, and the conductor empathizes with our hazy, glassy eyed stare, stating, “I know that you can’t forget. I know that you’re sleeping less. I know that your clouded thoughts give you no peace or rest, and now you sit and smile and when they ask you how you say, there’s nothing on my mind. Nothing on my mind.” Take your seat and look out the window. Not only did you leave your notions on the platform, you left your luggage there too. You never needed it—all that junk would only hold you back. The conductor has given you permission to discard these unnecessary and inhibitory items, therefore freeing you to experience yourself unencumbered by thoughts, any thoughts, all thoughts. Bye.

The third track, “Are You Tired (Keep on Singing)” serenades us into the steady rhythm of our train traveling across the countryside. If you weren’t tired before, the soothing tune will lull you into that meditative state. The exhaustion of leaving the stressors of our life behind are hitting now. All that weight we were carrying was killing us, now we can keep singing, keep the music going, let the train propel us forward.

Building up speed with track 4, “Graucha Max,” a voice again booms over the loudspeaker, but it’s indistinguishable, and at this point we are fully accepting of that. The percussion and experimental nature of the song splits at two separate points, once at the beginning as we build into the theme, and again towards the end as we disintegrate out of the melody and strip down to strident noise. We have entered and exited our first tunnel, and the landscape on the other side of this hill, as we venture into track 5, “American References,” is a midwestern plain, dusty and full of abandoned industrial equipment, offering the most spectacular crimson, violet, and golden-dipped clouds illuminated by the setting sun.

Our train maintains a healthy pace, straight into track 6, “Heavy Is Good For This,” bringing us into visual darkness, a place where we can rest our eyes and deepen our meditation. Only now can we begin to understand why this strange ride was offered up to us so generously in the first place. We were the kids chosen by Santa to receive the first gift of Christmas - the most generous gift of all - nothing.

With minds finally clear, we can gain a modicum of perspective, realizing that everyone is living in this hell of toting our cumbersome physical and psychological belongings through time and space, everywhere we go. The two part “Hell Suite” occupying Tracks 7 and 8 extends a bird’s-eye view of all our fellow tribe members, trudging through this prison sentence. As we close with track 9, “Sin El Sol No Hay Nada,” we question whether we stayed up all night on this trip or if we were indeed asleep and the whole thing was a dream. As we rise, the sun again breaks the darkness. Without it, there is nothing. Striking this balance between being nothing, embracing nothing, realizing that nothing is everything in the sense that the pure nature of our existence lies in this state of emptiness, brings us one step closer to understanding reality. The final track’s swirling vacuum crescendo ends abruptly, leaving a void that is not an empty end, but a fertile beginning.