Just last week, I had a conversation with a friend and fellow parent, who asked me if I sometimes worry about the world we have brought children into. “Of course,” I answered… for who couldn’t? I never regret having my son, even for an instant, but I wish I had more confidence in the world, and his future wellbeing. Our parents and grandparents used to push for their children’s lives to be better, and easier, than their own. Such an aspiration feels difficult right now, and I would settle for a life experience that just resembles the comfort of our generation’s.
On Daughter, North London-based producer, vocalist, and songwriter, Darkstates has created a beautifully heartfelt piece of emotionally impactful electronic music. His inspiration for the record comes from his experience of thinking about the trade-offs of bringing a child into the world, or choosing to forge a path alone out of concern for what their experience could be. The daughter of the song’s title is imaginary – the record sung to the child Darkstates has opted not to have. In his words:
‘I came up with this concept of writing a song to my imaginary daughter – if I had the opportunity to speak to her now, what would I say? I thought about her getting to adulthood and living on an uninhabitable planet. I would want to explain to her that I thought it was best not to bring her into the world, to protect her from all that. I guess it’s a sort of apology to her, really. I hope she would understand and forgive me.’
I find both this description, and the song itself, utterly heartbreaking. The sense of mourning in Daughter is palpable. The haunting vocal sings of warming seas, waste, and air pollution, filled with a sadness about a future potentially denied for all of us. Yet, it is the personal way Darkstates sings about these that resonates most strongly. The lines explicitly for an unborn child — ‘Take you home now, on my shoulders’, for example — that resonate with the most personal loss. That chorus of disastrous environmental impacts hits home precisely because it opens with the line, ‘Though I would have loved you, in the boiling seas’. It is a tribute that can’t help but feel devastating.
Underpinning the heartfelt vocal is a restrained, electronic production style that combines a nagging melodic, melancholic synth and subtle percussion. Darkstates creates a textural and cinematic feel, blending live instrumentation with analogue synths, creating the kind of genre-agnostic music Thom Yorke is known for.
I found Daughter deeply affecting. I may have made a different choice to Darkstates, but I feel and share that heartbreak all the same.