Senior Dunce’s new single, “Bestial,” has arrived, feeling less like a typical release and more like an urgent, slightly baffling philosophical tract wrapped in a day-glo dance floor invitation. It’s a funky house dance track, make no mistake. Yet, this isn’t solely an invitation to shuffle your feet; it’s a dispatch from the messy, gloriously imperfect front lines of human existence.
Dunce, a self-proclaimed eccentric seasoned for decades in Korea’s music cauldrons as a sound designer and club owner, seems to be serving up a potent challenge: let’s all stare down our inner beasts.
The production itself has a curious polish, a slickness that almost belies the raw, uncomfortable truths it chaperones onto the dance floor. The beat bounces, relentlessly, while the lyrical undercurrent speaks of battles, of acknowledging the wildness we carry, the pain that comes with just being. It’s like finding a theological treatise inexplicably stuck to the bottom of a discarded glitter ball from some hedonistic, forgotten club.
One moment I’m contemplating the “vessel” of openness he proposes, the next I’m wondering if my rubber plant also wrestles with pre-conscious anxieties, especially after that prolonged synth fade that felt less like a musical choice and more like the universe catching its breath before a particularly awkward societal confession.
Senior Dunce isn’t peddling easy answers. He’s lobbing funky little truth-bombs of self-acceptance into the neatly arranged living rooms of our repression. The idea of embracing our flaws, our “animalistic nature,” while a groovy, infectious bassline thumps… well, it’s certainly one way to approach liberation from the straitjacket of societal expectation.
There’s a particular keyboard stab that recurs, sounding like the punctuation mark after a very profound, slightly unhinged pronouncement made by a sage who communicates exclusively through interpretive dance.
This track doesn’t smooth things over. It agitates, it pokes, it almost insists you move even as you’re pondering the ancestral cruelties he hints at. The “better way” suggested isn’t paved with pristine intentions; it’s a muddied, vibrant path, well-worn by those willing to boogie with their shadows.
So, what if the purest state of mind is found not by rigorous tidying, but by learning to revel amidst the splendid, bewildering, beautifully “bestial” clutter of it all?
