Mirror of Venus are Joy Damert, Jose Espinoza, Heidi Weber, and Margot Rhodes—a Los Angeles post-punk outfit whose time together dates back a decade, to nights spent playing in a small but tightly knit scene in San Francisco’s Mission. Now transplants in Southern California, they’ve found one another again, bonding over their love of late ‘70s/early ‘80s UK post-punk pioneers like The Durutti Column, Sad Lovers & Giants, and Wire.
Their self-released debut single, “Never Say Forever”, is a nearly six-minute rain of spidery guitars and feverish synths that began to take shape early in the pandemic, Rhodes starting to writing again as she first arrived in Los Angeles. Built around an insistent, almost haunted rhythm, it’s a meditation on what we lose when we give ourselves over to social media.
“The song is about a person who feels isolated from the modern world and begins to battle with an internal monologue that is trying to convince them that the only way to fit in is to completely lose their true identity and to succumb to a new digital version of themselves,” says Espinoza, also of LA darkwave project, Shock Doctrine. “The new self being obsessed with aesthetics, being photographed, and being perceived in a way that would suggest that this normally meek person is actually very wild and outgoing. Towards the end of the song the person begins to question their decision. The ‘voice’ in their head begins to fill them with doubt about their choice and then they begin to question the validity of the happiness that these people portray with their online presence.”
