Pretty at Dawn Enters the Dark Wave Conversation Four Years After Golem Dance Cult's Nosferatu Waltz
Inga Liljestrom Moves From Backing Vocals to the Lead on the Franco-Australian Duo’s Vampire Song
Pretty at Dawn is the sixth of thirteen tracks on Shamanic Faultlines, the second album from Golem Dance Cult. About 200 days later, the dark wave song moved up the queue with a video of its own. Australian singer Inga Liljestrom takes the lead and Jean-Philippe Feiss plays cello. The story also brings back a figure this Franco-Australian duo first set to music in 2021: the vampire.
Golem Dance Cult’s Pretty at Dawn now sits in our Indie Rock, Alt Rock and New Wave playlist below. The duo’s full coverage record lives on the Golem Dance Cult artist profile. The track reached RockCharts.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Play it once, then read on for the catalogue behind it.
Golem Dance Cult Have Stitched Old Horror Films Into Their Videos Since the 2021 Grotesque Radio EP
Three releases make up the catalogue so far, and they line up neatly. The six-track Grotesque Radio EP came out on 25 May 2021. Next, the eleven-track debut album, Legend of the Bleeding Heart, followed on 23 May 2023. Shamanic Faultlines, with thirteen tracks, arrived on 13 June 2025. That is a release roughly every two years, each one longer than the last.
Behind it are two old friends. Charles Why and Laur first played together as teenagers, with Laur as the drummer. They spent years in separate bands before regrouping in 2021. Today Laur is based in France, while Charles Why has moved from the UK to Australia. Laur now sings lead and plays percussion. Meanwhile, the music comes from Charles Why, who also sings, plays guitar and bass, handles the programming and produces. They file the result under industrial dance rock.
Klaus Karloff’s Videos Borrow From Nosferatu, Der Golem and Plan 9 From Outer Space
The videos are where the catalogue shows its hand. Klaus Karloff and Charles Why built Marry Me Frankenstein in June 2021. It uses footage from the Edison studio’s 1910 Frankenstein and Paul Wegener’s Der Golem. Karloff then shot Nosferatu Waltz in England and France for Halloween that year. The edit adds scenes from Murnau’s Nosferatu, White Zombie with Bela Lugosi and Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Later, the Dalek Rhetoric video, from January 2023, borrowed from Plan 9 From Outer Space. Karloff filmed it at Emerald station outside Melbourne and in Besançon and Belfort. Finally, 21st Century Dogs followed four months later with nods to Night of the Living Dead and Un Chien Andalou.
Carpe Noctem, from the 2023 album, drew reviews in English, French and Spanish. They include The Real Ding in the UK and Indie Chronique in France. RockCharts.News also logged it that autumn, in an October 2023 round-up of classic, glam and metal releases.
Pretty at Dawn Hands the Lead to Inga Liljestrom and Brings Jean-Philippe Feiss’s Cello Into the Golem Sound
On most Golem Dance Cult records, Laur is the main voice. However, Pretty at Dawn is one of four Shamanic Faultlines tracks where the lead passes to Inga Liljestrom. She has been part of the story for longer than the album credits suggest. In fact, she sang backing vocals on Nosferatu Waltz in 2021 and made a cameo at the end of its video. Four years on, the singer who backed that waltz is out front for another vampire story.
Charles Why composed the music, plays the guitar and shares the lyric credit with Laur. Jean-Philippe Feiss adds the cello and has history here too. The duo shared an artist credit with Feiss on Feels Like Tuesday (Deja Vu), from the 2023 album. Charles Why recorded it at the Black Obsidian Woodshed studio, with Klaus Karloff co-producing. Milan Bruneau then created the video, and Karloff moved to the edit.
That line-up is the change. Most of Shamanic Faultlines leans on heavy guitar and groove, the industrial dance rock the duo trade in. By contrast, Pretty at Dawn puts its two guests first. Liljestrom’s lead is bright and sits up front, and Feiss’s cello shares the frame with Charles Why’s guitar. As a result, it plays as a brooding piece of dark wave.
The lyric is a short horror story. A narrator watches a woman sleep under the stars, pale, her eyes closed. The chorus fixes the hour: dawn, when light closes around the dark. Then the details turn. Her lips are red, her teeth are sharp, and the last lines leave the narrator covered in blood. Under the video, the band’s own note reads it as a relationship where nothing is what it looks like.
The Vampire in Pretty at Dawn Joins the Frankenstein, Dalek and Wendigo Songs in the Golem Dance Cult Run
Put the titles side by side and the through-line is plain. Marry Me Frankenstein, Nosferatu Waltz, Dalek Rhetoric and Call of the Wendigo now share space with a vampire. Four of the five videos on the duo’s own list borrow from early cinema, most of it horror. In other words, the songs keep returning to the same cast of monsters.
The band’s structure has a well-known model. The Sisters of Mercy formed in Leeds in 1980 and changed line-up for each of their three studio albums. Across that run, The Sisters of Mercy kept two constants, Andrew Eldritch and a drum machine named Doktor Avalanche. Similarly, Golem Dance Cult run on the same principle at a smaller scale. Two writers and their programming sit at the centre, and guests rotate through from one album to the next.
The cello has a famous precedent as well. Echo & the Bunnymen recorded most of Ocean Rain in Paris in early 1984, with a 35-piece orchestra. For Echo & the Bunnymen, Adam Peters arranged the strings and played cello on the record. Pretty at Dawn works on a far smaller scale, with one cellist and one guest singer. Still, it shares the same instinct: let a bowed string into a post-punk song.
Where Pretty at Dawn Sits for Dark Wave Listeners
Some listeners come to dark wave through post-punk and gothic rock, and like a song with a story attached. For them, Pretty at Dawn is the easiest way into this catalogue. First, watch the video. Then hear it on Shamanic Faultlines, between There no Church in this Town and Personal Black Hole.
RockCharts.News’s curator team:
“Pretty at Dawn tells a whole horror story in two minutes and 53 seconds without wasting a line. For a duo that usually fills a song with riffs and guests, it shows how little a good idea needs.”
Stream Golem Dance Cult on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Subscribe to their YouTube channel. Follow the duo on Instagram, Facebook, X and Threads, or visit their official site.
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