Temples - 'Vendetta'

Put your headphones on, find somewhere quiet, and let Temples take you somewhere you didn't know you needed to go.

"Vendetta" does not ease you in. The second single from Temples ahead of their forthcoming album BLISS pulls you under immediately, wraps a trance around your shoulders like something warm and slightly dangerous, and by the time you realise what's happened your body is already moving and your brain has quietly clocked out. And when you find out this is a band coming back from the silence that followed 2023's near-invisible Exotico, rebuilding from scratch, signing to V2 and going back into a room together with no outside hands on the wheel, the song hits even harder. This is what it sounds like when a band stops making music for other people and starts making it entirely for themselves.

The song was originally two separate ideas that had no business being together. A Justice and Daft Punk-sounding sample on one side, something closer to a David Guetta or Avicii record on the other. When the band fused them, something unpredictable happened. The scuzzy riff and the lasering synth stopped fighting each other and started pulling in the same direction, which turns out to be directly into your nervous system. It should be a shock to the senses. It is. It should make you want to move. It does. From the very first beat it is pulling you somewhere and you go willingly because you have no choice.

"Fall away / I wanna feel alive / Sign off the night / And leave without your vendetta."

Then there is the moment at 1:13. A filtered synth, a processed ghost of their own guitar rebuilt into something unrecognisable, swooping and euphoric and over almost before you have clocked it. This is what Bagshaw calls building "audio Pantones," the band sampling and manipulating their own sounds across BLISS into a shared palette, a collage that feels interconnected rather than assembled. That sound is entirely theirs. It belongs to no reference point. And when the drop follows it, you will sit completely still for a moment. Then you will go back and play it again just to feel it land a second time.

The lyrics move from darkness upward without announcement. "Deliver me into the night" in the first verse quietly becomes "deliver me into the sky" in the second, and the whole song follows that arc without ever making a fuss about it. This is what Temples mean when they talk about melancholic euphoria: simple structures giving rise to complex feeling, bittersweet and alive at the same time. Headphones in, volume up, and you are no longer where you were. You are somewhere alone above all of it, the trance fully in and the drop still ringing somewhere in your chest.

A band who rebuilt themselves from the ground up and came back sounding more like themselves than ever. "Vendetta" is melancholic euphoria made physical. You will play it again just to feel it land. That is the only review it needs. But it deserves this one too.

Words by Dhriti Duggal

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