“My Heartstrings Come Undone” by Demon Hunter, Saturday, February 13, 2021

I’d like to imagine Ryan Clark sitting in freshman English class passing a love letter to some gothic girl, only to have the note intercepted. Perhaps the teacher had been lecturing on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, and was rudely interrupted by the rustling of paper passed through the aisles of desks. The teacher resembles the late Alan Rickman and he reads the letter, muttering in his gravelly Severus Snape voice. "You see class," he speaks up, "if you want the opposite sex to fall for you, a writer doesn't merely say, 'I will love you to death.' The writer uses more vivid language to express the intentions of his heart." Young Ryan Clark took this as a challenge and wrote the gothic love song that appears in my 2021 February Playlist.

IT'S BURIED DEEP WITHIN THE PAST. In early April of my Junior year, my school went on a mission trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. We did a lot of driving and listened to a lot of music during that time. Many of my classmates were into hardcore and metal, and Demon Hunter's Summer of Darkness album was about to be released. Somehow this song made its way onto a mixtape or a promo CD, and everyone was in awe of how cool this song was. The dark lyrics and demon imagery spoke to the group's collective religiosity and turned the youth group to a darker shade. Gone were the days of Newsboys and Audio Adrenaline. Now everyone was obsessed with demonology. And this was a pretty good alternative to Harry Potter, right?

THE DARK AESTHETIC. I wrote about Demon Hunter last month. Ryan Clark has talked about how Demon Hunter was an art project before it was a band on the Labeled podcast. He talks about the band is continuously influenced by bands like Nine Inch Nails on their latest albums. He talks about how Pink Floyd's Wish You We Here album cover influenced his album artwork design on the Lead Singer Syndrome podcast. This caused him and his brother to create a highly successful graphic design company who has designed the most iconic album covers to the CDs I owned back in high school and a plethora of other projects including work commissioned by NASA, Target, and other companies. Clark is a versatile artist working, so not everything is dark and dreary. However, for his personal aesthetic, it gets dark. From screaming at the gates of hell to singing about to dying of old age--rather decaying, with his wife.