Philadelphia, PA · darkwave · synth-punk

Cold Cave

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Wesley Eisold's synth project — hardcore roots audible under the cold, enormous hooks, darkwave built by someone who learned intensity the loud way.

Wesley Eisold founded Cold Cave in 2007, his first venture into instrumentation after years fronting hardcore bands American Nightmare, Give Up the Ghost and Some Girls, and after founding the Heartworm Press imprint. Eisold, who was born with one hand, has said the condition pushed him toward electronic music rather than guitar.

The music draws on early industrial, minimal wave and 1980s synth-pop, particularly the atmosphere of Joy Division and New Order: drum machines, layered analogue keyboards, and Eisold's flat, low vocal set against unexpectedly large melodic hooks, pitched somewhere between dancefloor and headphones.

Love Comes Close first appeared through small labels including Dais, Hospital Productions and What's Your Rupture before Matador Records reissued it in 2009. Matador also released the follow-up, Cherish the Light Years, in 2011, the same year Cold Cave remixed Belle and Sebastian's 'I Didn't See It Coming.' The band performed inside the Guggenheim Museum's sculpture galleries in 2012 and at the Getty Center later that year.

Eisold spent 2012 and 2013 writing and recording a series of stand-alone singles alone at his apartment desk, then toured behind them with Gary Numan, industrial figure Boyd Rice and Nitzer Ebb's Douglas McCarthy, including dates across Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand, Nepal and Hong Kong. The lineup has shifted over the years, with Amy Lee performing alongside Eisold in more recent incarnations, and he has kept releasing singles and EPs through Heartworm Press.

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