Rare DM, the Brooklyn-based brainchild of singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Erin Hoagg, returns with a new single and video, “The Ring.” A ghostly follow up to last year’s hypnotically carnal “Skater Hits Me Harder,” the track is an electronic odyssey about the mayhem that erupts trying to fix something when it should have just been left alone.
“’The Ring’ is a journey into the chaos you created by trying to make things better,” Hoagg says. “It is about a misunderstanding – did you make it worse by addressing it in the first place? You tried to fix it and now it’s even more messed up. Who is the real enemy now? Did you ‘fuck around and find out’?”
Hoagg also directed and edited the accompanying music video and bonus lyric video. Shot over two nights in the frigid Michigan winter while battling pneumonia, it channels Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” Mulholland Drive, and The Blair Witch Project for a filmic companion that heightens the track’s hypnotic aura.
She explains, “In the video I am the driver, doing the chasing, being chased, in the passenger seat, and getting lost in the woods. It’s confusing, just as the situation behind the song was. It’s not some resolved buttoned up thing — not a friend you cut off or a lover you stopped seeing. Something cloudy and more sinister.”
Rare DM is a sonic force reshaping the landscape of NYC electronica. Armed with a collection of vintage analogue synthesizers and drum machines, she crafts intimate, alluring tunes that are a hallucinatory blend of black-shaded aesthetics and neon-lit dance-pop. Drawing inspiration from EBM, minimal techno, electroclash, post-punk, and bloghouse, her songs are propulsive yet deeply intimate, rendering in raw detail the search for that special connection we all crave, but rarely find.
How do you feel about “The Ring” from Rare DM?
