Oliver Marson unites with Jessica Winter on new single ‘Madeline’
London-based singer-songwriter Oliver Marson shares his new single ‘Madeline’ – a gothic, campy meditation on blind love – featuring acclaimed songwriter and producer Jessica Winter. The track is accompanied by an experimental video directed by Timothy Heinrich, created entirely through a technique called scanography. ‘Madeline’ is the second single lifted from Marson’s forthcoming EP ‘Into The Darkness‘ – out 14th November via High Road Records.
Built on smoky guitars and vampirish melodrama, ‘Madeline’ plunges into the self-destructive extremes of passion, as Marson explains: “For me, Madeline is an exploration of blind love. The song delves into how love can become dark, oppressive, and incredibly sad – it’s exhausting, almost claustrophobic. Ultimately, it’s about being in love with someone, perhaps to an unhealthy degree, where the lines between passion and pain begin to blur.”
The track’s video, Heinrich and Marson’s first collaboration, pushes further into experimental territory. Using nothing but a document scanner, Heinrich painstakingly built the stop-motion sequence frame by frame – over 700 scans in total. Inspired by Francis Bacon, David Lynch, and the mechanical eeriness of 90s business photocopiers, the result is a surreal hybrid of art film and music video. As Heinrich describes: “A surprisingly monotonous task involving dozens of props, two mouthfuls of syllables, and one nearly blind Oliver Marson. We wanted to create something truly unique with just a single technique.”
Lyrically, Marson drew from his gothic literary heroes – Byron, Baudelaire, Keats – blending their romantic darkness with sonic cues from Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Cave, and Jack Ladder. There are even flashes of Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘Lullabies to Paralyse’ in the song’s sinister groove. The result is one of Marson’s most richly textured works yet.
On collaborating with Jessica Winter, Marson said: “Jessica is a creative force with one path and one vision, and I admire that a lot in her. It was around the time I was helping with some songs on her album, and I realised I really needed a female voice on Madeline because it’s about love. I couldn’t imagine anyone else singing it — she has a suitably gothic vibe and a great voice.”
Following the goth-pop grandeur of previous EP taster ‘Jeremy‘, new single ‘Madeline’ deepens the portrait of obsession and dissolution that defines Marson’s new EP. Where Marson’s previous releases have examined the grotesqueries of British modern life through satirical detachment, this new era is a plunge inward – reckoning with grief, and the existential confusion that arose in the aftermath of a breakup.
“While the EP originates from a place of desperation, the process of creating it became an act of transfiguration of the soul and an internal healing of these emotional demons. The EP is about the raw act of exposing myself, embracing vulnerability, and being utterly honest with my feelings. My aim was to transform this darkness into something beautiful. There is a part of myself that only truly comes alive when I’m making music. That is where I find the value, and it’s in the creative process that I can fully tap into and express the rawest, most vulnerable, and sometimes darkest corners of my being.”
‘Into The Darkness’ threads together themes of tech obsession, identity dissolution, and gothic romance, with tracks tackling whistleblowing, collapsing systems, and deluded self-help culture, all exploring what it means to lose control in a world obsessed with performance.
‘Into The Darkness’ – EP artwork & track list
1. Whistleblower
2. Madeline (feat. Jessica Winter)
3. Jeremy
4. Into The Darkness
LIVE DATES
08 Nov – London, Paper Dress Vintage
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