BLOOD IN THE CHAMPAGNE — Blood in the Champagne album as reviewed by Mark J. " This is a serious record made by people who mean it"

 BLOOD IN THE CHAMPAGNE — Blood in the Champagne

BLOOD IN THE CHAMPAGNE — Blood in the Champagne album as reviewed by Mark J. " This is a serious record made by people who mean it"
 (Self-Released) Naarm/Melbourne

There's a Melbourne underground that doesn't care about your approval. It's been there for decades, running its own shows, making its own rules, existing entirely outside the machinery of whatever the industry decides is the moment. Blood in the Champagne belongs to that lineage. Three people — Kymin Kaos, Adem Parlar, Gabriel EA Clark — making post-punk darkwave that feels genuinely political and genuinely felt. That combination is rarer than it sounds.

Released late March 2026, this self-titled debut full-length is ten tracks of shadow and intent. Disillusion (Intro) opens with loss already embedded in its DNA — naked, rain-drenched, past tense. The record never leaves that emotional register, but it moves through it with real range. Blackdance is propulsive and fractured, repetition working like accumulation, like the accumulation of grey days and conformity. "These towns are grey. A stain. A stain. A stain." There's something genuinely menacing about how they deploy that word — confession — like it's both accusation and absolution.

Burning Brightly has the bones of classic post-punk — vibing somewhere between early Killing Joke and The Cure on a tense night where you feel unsettled — but it's pushed through something distinctly Naarm, something aware of this specific place and political moment. "We can smash the state and eat the rich until we're satisfied" isn't posturing when it's buried in a track this cold and this precise. This brilliant band always drips in authentic emotion and grit. Safe Pair of Hands is the record's centre of gravity — Toorak money and bread knives and the whole grotesque distance between who has and who doesn't. It hits harder than any shock tactic would, despite being a stunning, atmospheric mood piece.

Black Pool and Riches push the sound outward, drawing in something more atmospheric, more expansive. Blackpool is unquestionably a brooding and resonating anthem; one that showcases the discordant guitarwork, the fiercely dominant bass tone and the minimalist drum mechanics, which are actually very technical. The restraint in instrumentation is striking and confident, as are the mesmerising dual vocals.  Riches fractures across languages — French, Turkish, English — and in doing so captures something about the way capital moves, the way exclusion works. Casper Maxwell's engineering is worth noting, too. The mix serves the darkness without drowning it.

And then there's Sindy's Filthy Makeup Box. Wildly different in tone, thrillingly so — leather, bite, Slavic phonetics, something that sounds like it was pulled from a Berlin basement at 3am. Wild Abandoned closes things out as pure statement: streets of Naarm, rain, banners, queerness unapologetic and unconditional. And as memorable as every track prior, the album serves as a wonderfully rich, creative document, or more so, a masterpiece where every part is well thought out and so sublime.

This is a serious record made by people who mean it. Get involved. Go to their shows, buy their music and merch and live the ethos.

SUPPORT THIS BAND HARD, SOME OF THE LOVELIEST PEOPLE EVER AND ALSO SO HARD WORKING AND CREATIVE WIZARDS!!!!

https://bloodinthechampagne.bandcamp.com/album/blood-in-the-champagne

https://www.facebook.com/Bloodinthechampagne

https://www.instagram.com/bloodinthechampagneband/