“Leave This Dying World Behind” — Faded Pulse Finds Solace in the Past on Ethereal Goth Album “Elysia”

Faded Pulse, the project of Washington D.C. musician Faeryn Johnson, has released Elysia, a second album blending ethereal wave, goth, folk, and dream pop with Victorian and medieval literary imagery. The record follows 2025’s Submission and the Fallen EP, marking a deliberate turn toward 1990s Projekt Records aesthetics (Lycia, Love Spirals Downwards, Black Tape for a Blue Girl) and 1960s–70s folk and psych (Pentangle, Donovan). Johnson cites a performance by Monica Richards with Strange Boutique as catalytic. Her formal training in art history informs the album’s visual world, drawing on Waterhouse, the Arts and Crafts movement, and Art Nouveau. The music pairs acoustic guitar, hammered dulcimer, electric bass, and ambient synthesis with narratives of ambiguous supernatural encounters. Johnson describes the shift from Submission’s 1980s synthpop leanings to folk arrangements as enabling new emotional and textural expression, rooted in listening habits evolved since 2022.

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