Berlin-based duo Dream & Onion aren’t afraid to stew in discomfort on their latest single, “Me And My Drugs” It’s not a clamoring or needy track. It overtakes you gradually, steadily, like a dense fog creeping in before daybreak. It’s an alternative rock that settles in the chest, weighty and human.
From the first mangled guitar chord into a world that’s numbed and raw at once. The production is dense with intention slow-burning is the phrase here. There’s some weight to the rhythm, like it’s dragging its feet through emotional sludge. And the band never overplays its hand for melodrama. There’s no explosive, climactic moment, no redemptive breakthrough. Instead, they dramatize something more challenging to put into words. The long, low ache of subdued addiction. Not the fall, but the float. Not the scream, but the sigh.
“Me And My Drugs” is a character sketch just as much as a confessional portrait of the happy, sad man. There’s detachment in the vocals, the almost offhanded way the lyrics sketch the line between knowing and doing nothing about what you know. It’s an emotional battle between apathy and awareness.
Dream & Onion don’t leap to conclusions for us. They trust the tension to tell its tale, and that’s what lets this track hit as hard as it does. It doesn’t beg the emote. It doesn’t ask you to care. It just says it as it is, perhaps in a strangely beautiful fashion, but then you sit there with it.