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Spacemoth’s New Single Turns the Feed Into a Field Recording
Maryam Qudus, aka Spacemoth, follows her punchy single "Do We Exist?" with "Internet Fantasy," a droning, kraut-tinged track that matches soothing vocals to a wash of distortion. The video by Jordan Macapagal amplifies the song’s screen-addiction theme with jittery, low-lit imagery.
Do We Exist? stopped me in my tracks when it arrived — that brisk, funky hit of clarity from Maryam Qudus that pushed Spacemoth onto a lot of weekly lists. Now she’s followed it with “Internet Fantasy,” a second single from Inward Eye that feels like a different room in the same house.
Where the first single swaggered, “Internet Fantasy” drifts. It leans into a noisy, droning krautrock pulse: motorik drums pulse like a slow conveyor belt, guitars ring out in long, metallic loops, and a persistent low-end hum stitches everything together. Qudus sings in a way that contradicts the racket — clear, almost conversational, a soothing counterpoint to the instrumental tumble. You can hear the nods to Kraftwerk and Cluster in the arrangement, but she’s not pastiching them so much as running their vocabulary through her own attention-sapped present-tense.
The song is about being pulled into the screen and losing the thread of your life. Lines about scrolling and staying present could have been sermonizing, but Qudus keeps it intimate: it sounds like someone saying the thing we all know while we’re doing it. That dissonance — pretty melody, claustrophobic production — makes it land harder.
Jordan Macapagal’s video leans into that tension. It cuts between low-lit rehearsal-room footage and blurred, digital-glitch montages: close-ups of pedals, a hand on a neck, interlaced frames that jitter like an interrupted livestream. There’s a moment about halfway through where the camera holds on Qudus’s face as the guitar noise swells behind her, and the effect is almost physical; you can feel the guitars crowd the frame until they spill over.
Play this back loud and you get the deluge they promised — distortion that feels less like ornament and more like weather. Played live, I imagine these songs mutating: the motorik pulse could snap into something danceable, or sink deeper into pure noise. Fans who connected with the first single will find a slower, stranger cousin here, one that asks more of your attention than it gives back.
Inward Eye lands 6/26 via Greenway. If “Do We Exist?” made you check the calendar, “Internet Fantasy” will remind you why you were paying attention in the first place.
