Nightshades marks the haunting debut LP from German trio Celestial Hex, a band who sound like they’ve crawled straight out of a forgotten VHS shelf and onto a midnight S‑Bahn platform. Released by Library of the Occult, the record distils years of Berlin underground fog into something sharply defined: a brooding strain of electro‑noir that welds the pulse of modern darkwave to the smeared colours and sinister romance of 80s cult cinema. These are songs that move like silhouettes under sodium light - sleek, hungry, and just a little unreal.

From the first track, Celestial Hex make it clear that this is not retro pastiche but a lived‑in world. Drum machines tick and throb with nightclub precision, anchoring basslines that stalk rather than strut, while synths swell in streaks of electric blue and blood‑red. Guitars, when they appear, are all texture and suggestion: reverbed stabs, chiming arpeggios, feedback ghosts hovering at the edge of the frame. Vocals slip between deadpan detachment and wounded urgency, carrying a sense of nocturnal confession - the kind of half‑truths traded at 3 a.m. on a wet pavement when the last train has already gone.

The band wear their cinematic allegiances on their black sleeves. Nightshades is deeply indebted to the atmospheric dread of VHS staples like Near Dark and The Lost Boys: films where vampirism is less about capes and castles than motorways, parking lots and small‑town carnivals glowing under bad fluorescent light. You can hear that influence in the way the songs handle tension. Many unfold like scenes - a slow, synth‑lit establishing shot, the gradual tightening of rhythm and harmony, the sudden appearance of a hook that feels like headlights coming around a corner. Choruses hit like wide shots of the night sky over a highway, streaked with neon and threat.