Thought Provoking Listen: A Review of Scrimshaw Porn’s ‘EPILOGUE’
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
Epilogue is the latest from his Boston-based indie dream pop project Scrimshaw Porn, and it’s arguably the most compelling thing he’s ever committed to tape
Fans of the piano-drenched intimacy of Olivia or the shimmering atmospherics of Eleonore may do a double-take. Epilogue arrives leaner, harder, and hungrier than anything in the Scrimshaw Porn catalogue — a groove-driven, synth-laced broadside that owes as much to the coiled industrial pulse of Nine Inch Nails as it does to the sun-bleached cool that has defined Helgesen’s sound to date. The DNA is still there — the melodic intelligence, the carefully layered production, the sense that every element has been placed with intention — but the emotional temperature has shifted dramatically.
Scrimshaw operates with the restraint of a writer who knows that implication cuts deeper than declaration. Epilogue carries the unmistakable weight of a cultural reckoning — a song about the gap between power and accountability, about the long arc of truth — but it never reduces itself to a headline. It trusts the listener. It always has.
The thematic territory Helgesen is navigating here is worth sitting with. Epilogue is addressed directly to victims — people failed by systems designed to protect the powerful rather than the vulnerable — and the title carries a deliberate double meaning. An epilogue is where buried truths finally surface, where the sanitised version of events gives way to the real one. Helgesen has spoken about writing the track as a form of catharsis, a response to watching institutional silence weaponised against those with the least recourse. That fury is present in every bar, but so is something more sustaining: the conviction that no cover-up is permanent, that accountability has a long memory even when justice moves slowly. In a cultural moment saturated with noise and deflection, Epilogue chooses clarity… and that choice gives the track a weight that outlasts the groove.
What’s most striking about Epilogue is what it signals about where Scrimshaw Porn is headed. After the Kbradio chart success of Olivia and the slow-burning radio momentum of Good Girl, Helgesen could have played it safe and delivered another pristine dream pop confection. Instead he’s delivered something that feels genuinely restless; a track that sounds like an artist refusing to be comfortable with his own formula.
An epilogue, by definition, is what gets said when everything else is done. On this evidence, Scrimshaw Porn is just getting started.
Epilogue is out now on all platforms.
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