Cults have always had their own soundtracks: songs written to win over, to bind, to manipulate, repeated until they settle beneath thought, becoming core belief and identity. In the disquieting afterlife of such music, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories begins. The new album from Zürich-based experimental electronic duo Perverts in White Shirts (Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips) is a two-hour cringe-pop journey of disarming, catchy tunes. A post-fringe hauntology for those shaped by worlds outside mainstream perception. 

Rooted in Nathalie’s isolated upbringing in the controversial Children of God cult, the album draws on fragments of this group’s music, alongside songs and texts from other fanatic movements and gurus. Working with this source material, the anarchic, tongue-in-cheek Perverts in White Shirts transmogrify, decontextualize, and reimagine melodies and words previously steeped in ideology, isolation, and indoctrination. In doing so, Dreier and Phillips blur the boundaries between belief and manipulation, intimacy and control, and devotion and performativity. This is a journey of confrontation and subversive reclamation seen through a critical social lens, one that folds sincerity into sonic irony, irreverence into raw ache, and emotional immediacy into distortion and unease.

In a world where so many seek truth and community, cultic logic mirrors the structures we inhabit every day: from micro compliance to algorithmic devotion to wellness dogma and moral absolutism. Rather than offering resolution, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories dwells in the realms of ambiguity, where contradictory meanings coexist and discomfort remains unresolved while catchy fragments of belief and cultural delusion echo on and dance for a new audience.