Posted by The Dutch band Monokino finally released their long-awaited track “No Return,” and surprise surprise, the lyrics are in Mandarin Chinese. The band reincarnated from their industrial goth phase into bolder sound choices, right after “the EDM cult of personality took over.”
Their romantic ballad “No Return,” with a baroque electronic production, is a beautiful artistic sophistication of the dilemmatic issue of homecoming. The songwriter and frontman George van Wetering of Monokino, the once hailed as “the industrial goth band,” questions his ability to stay in China and questions whether coming back home is a good idea at all. George does not speak fluent Chinese Mandarin, but he wanted the song to be in Chinese, and it gave such a special flavor to the listening experience.
The song tells the struggle of a person floating between diverse worlds so different from one another. As George sings, “there is no way back” for him to a non-global world. “No Return” has the cosmic ability to bring you back to the long-forgotten past and put you face to face with it. The soulful sounds and expressive vocals unleash your deepest fears and hesitations from the world that seems far away. The theme adds surreal pain to bittersweet vocals and makes the listening experience beautifully soul torturing.