Explosive. Cinematic. Unrelenting. And that's just the beginning.
Robots in Love from Ōtepoti, Aotearoa (Dunedin, New Zealand) are smashing the wall between rock and electronic music. Drawing from industrial rock, dark electro, drum & bass, trip hop, goth, metal and progressive music, they sound less like a genre and more like a world of their own.
“…the band might just invent a new form of expression—headbang dancing. If such a concept didn’t exist before, this group from New Zealand ensures it becomes a movement.” - ProgSphere.com
With a reputation built across live performance, production and collaboration, Elenor Rayner brings decades of experience as a vocalist, producer and remixer, as well as hundreds of live performances worldwide, including Wave-Gotik-Treffen, the world's largest gothic festival.
Alex Burchell brings an equally diverse musical background, combining his work as a progressive rock/metal producer with experience as a remixer, synthwave artist and classical performer with the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra.
The fusion of raw emotion from Rayner with Burchell's technical skills and precision creates an epic and unique style of dark electronica, which hits just as hard at their live shows as it does through headphones.
They have released 6 singles, 4 EPs and an album ACTIVATE! which reached #17 on the Aotearoa Music Chart, and have toured Aotearoa and 4 trips to Australia.
What's next:
Over the past 18 months they have been working on their second album, OVERRIDE, in collaboration with guitarist Henry Flynn Wall from Rebirth To Ruin.
Cease and Desist, a melodic industrial track about extreme obsession, is the second single from the album.
Included in the release is a remix by legendary Australian cyberpunk band, Sirus, as well as Alex Burchell's remix under the name Magnetique.
For fans of Nine Inch Nails, Bring Me The Horizon, Poppy and HEALTH, Robots in Love offer something familiar enough to pull you in, and interesting enough to make you stay.
REVIEWS
Robots In Love have the sort of name that promises chrome-plated heartbreak, and their latest single Cease and Desist delivers an emotional sucker punch. The New Zealand dark electronic duo of vocalist-producer Elenor Rayner and drummer-producer Alex Burchell builds the song around obsession gone feral: attraction narrowing into fixation, fixation hardening into dependency, and reason getting shoved somewhere beneath the furniture. There is no polite exit once the appetite starts feeding on itself.
The guitars come down hard, with hardcore licks driven right up against industrial metal without quite falling into Ministry cosplay. There is some of SINE’s bruising electronic pressure here, along with the blackened mechanical weight of latter-day Gary Numan, while the bigger synth architecture brushes against HEALTH, Nine Inch Nails, Sirus, and V.A.S.T. Burchell’s drumming has the clipped exactitude of somebody who has spent years learning how machines think, while Rayner sings from inside the mess those machines could never clean up.
Desire behaves like bad wiring in the skull, making sleeplessness feel necessary and self-erasure almost reasonable. The chorus grows huge enough to suggest somebody shouting through concrete, yet the verses keep dragging the listener back toward the private humiliation of knowing exactly what is happening and remaining unable to stop it.
“I recently discovered the word ‘limerence’ and started thinking about extreme obsession,” says Rayner. “Hence the line “limerence closes every door” where no amount of reasoning can get through. Musically, it’s got dark, heavy riffs, cinematic synths and an epic chorus.”
The video, directed by Lichen Sorrel and Rayner, places the band inside a rain-soaked environment where reality keeps slipping sideways. Their movements feel slowed and strangely detached, as though the performers have wandered into somebody else’s private hallucination and decided to finish the set anyway.
Rayner has been working toward this collision for decades. She began playing Australian pubs on bass at fourteen before moving into electronic production on an Atari computer, “which opened up a universe of creating sounds and moulding them into rhythms and melodies until they evoke the exact feeling I need.” Her history runs through Soulscraper, Sobriquet, Snog, and The Crystalline Effect before Robots In Love took shape in New Zealand in 2017. Joined by Burchell in this current powerhouse incarnation, the project has developed a nasty elegance that can turn technical precision into emotional damage.
With second album OVERRIDE ahead and guitarist Henry Flynn Wall joining the record, Cease and Desist makes obsession feel less romantic than chemical, compulsive, and absurd in the terrible way our worst impulses often are. Love may open doors, but limerence bolts them shut from the inside.
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