Things are moving very quickly for Deceits, to the point where it might come as a surprise if you haven't been following them. With a debut album released in 2023 and a second in 2025, the Los Angeles-based trio is currently on its first European tour and was playing in France for the very first time at an event organised by Sanit Mils. They needed at least the dark stones of the legendary Caves Saint-Sabin to welcome them, and as the doors opened, we noticed something interesting: the audience was young, very young. We saw almost none of the usual faces, the ‘eternal oldies’ of Parisian goth parties (meaning those over 35). Deceits has 500 followers on Facebook, that internet's graveyard of the elephants... but more than 50,000 on Instagram! This is further proof that post-punk, cold wave and the like are enjoying a revival and still have a bright, melancholic future ahead of them.
HEIMBERG
Dark scenes mutate, reinvent themselves, evolve. This is true in all genres: we bet that at the Elysée Montmartre, where Mayhem was playing at the same time, you could bump into lots of very handsome and very clean black metal hipsters! Here, it's the same: the Strasbourg trio doesn't give a damn about clichés. In 2026, goths wear caps! What matters is the music. Heimberg's music is cold, contemporary, sad. Their post-punk isn't without industrial mechanical touches, and they play without a drummer, with the drum machine providing its dehumanised rigour.
Heimberg released a new album two months ago, Faceless, whose tracks are logically in the spotlight tonight. The chilling despair of Fragrance opens the evening. The melody hits home, the plaintive vocals resonate. Gigatons of smoke fill the Caves with fog. You can't see anything anymore, but that's just as well: the world is ugly anyway. So let's contemplate our inner ruins, which are even uglier. In this atmosphere, the echoes of Bury my Soul, full of funeral reverberations, have quite an effect. It's theatrical, tormented, both poetic and anxiety-inducing – in short, everything we could ask for to start an evening underground!
RASKOLNIKOV
When you're gothic, it's cool to refer to books or films in black and white. Raskolnikov is the main character in Crime and Punishment, which was adapted into a film by Josef von Sternberg in 1935, starring Peter Lorre in the lead role, a legend of expressionist cinema, film noir and gothic fantasy. It's a bit of a shame that no one in Raskolnikov looks like Peter Lorre, whose small silhouette and bulging eyes we would have loved to see in the dim light of the cellars!
That's our only regret, to be honest. Well, the pink spotlights shining straight into our eyes were of course not ideal, but it was established earlier that this wasn't an evening for seeing clearly. Anyway, Peter Lorre isn't on stage, so who cares if we can't see. Raskolnikov didn't put much emphasis on looks either. In the smoke, their melancholy takes on a jarring tone, the guitar moans and the beginning of the concert is full of tension (Hunde sind an der Leine zu Führen and Montauk Point Lighthouse, energetic). We like the slightly offbeat, slightly Dadaist batcave shadows. Raskolnikov is not lacking in humour: Éteins ta Clope ("put out your cigarette") is played later, but hey, that doesn't change the amount of smoke much. At the end of the set, Faut pas faire Chier Albert Roche ("don't piss Albert Roche off") combines a B-movie title with a First World War soldier in an angsty, angry track that raises the temperature in Les Caves: despite its wintery sadness and coldly striking songs, Raskolnikov's music also knows how to get our blood boiling.
DECEITS
Ah, finally, there they are: goths wearing make-up! And even black capes! During the opening acts, Deceits were hard to find at the merch table, as they were primping and preening to show us their best faces. The trio kicked off with Failures and it was an instant success: the crowd was buzzing, moving around, shouting in the smoke, sweating underground. With their romantic imagery and music inspired by The Cure, we were expecting something introspective, something to gaze sadly at the emptiness of our lives. No way, Deceits rock! On stage, their punk energy is explosive.
Singer/bassist Kevin ‘Puppy’ Moreno is passionate and very communicative. He exchanges as many words as smiles, kindness being a key word at Deceits. Finally, he also says “fuck” a lot, which is funny. It's hot, but it's with his ‘fuck ICE!’ that he finally melts our hearts, the audience at Les Caves responding enthusiastically. He explains that it will feel strange to return to his country, with everything that is going on there. For a band that is openly opposed to fascism and exudes such gentleness, our hearts ache: you will always be welcome here, underground, with us weirdos, misfits, even those who are young, on Instagram and wearing caps!
The set builds to a crescendo, culminating in a finale that strings together Deceits' most famous tracks: Mi Amor, mi Vampira, where punk urgency and Latin sensibility dance feverishly, Drowning in an Empty Sea, whose melancholy explodes, boosted by the energy of despair... and, as a grand finale, an intense cover of Boys Don't Cry in front of a frenzied audience. It's over. People are shouting and applauding. Then they start calling for an encore. Encore! Encore! Not stingy and slightly amused, Deceits returns and plays Please, Wake Up again. Then it's over. People are shouting, applauding... and calling for another encore! Encore! Encore! Well, come on, Deceits, still not stingy, still has something up their sleeve for us. There's been nothing written on the set list for a while now, we're sailing blind in the fog. To finish, Deceits decides to send us one last furious, punk, intense song, with a cover of Fuck Nazi Sympathy by The Dirty Coal Train. ‘Too fierce for goths, too romantic for punks’: that's how Deceits describes itself. Well, yes, it was fierce, it was romantic, and why choose when you can have it all? These three are irresistible on stage, and if this is the future of our goth scenes, then there's hope for us all!
