The announcement marks the first major release under "The Soft Pink Truth" name since Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This? in 2022. Daniel, who also forms one half of the seminal electronic duo Matmos alongside M.C. Schmidt, has long been celebrated for melding rigorous conceptual frameworks with rhythmic immediacy and sonic invention. "The Soft Pink Truth" alias has offered him space to pursue club-inflected ruptures, avant-metal reinterpretations, and thorny dance-floor narratives across nearly two decades.
Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? signals a new phase in this trajectory. The eight-track collection features titles such as
1 Mere Survival Is Not Enough
2 And By and By a Cloud Takes All Away
3 Phrygian Ganymede
4 Underneath (I)
5 L’Esprit de l’Escalier
7 Orchard
8 Underneath (II)
From the press release, Daniel frames the work as an inquiry into the limitations of pleasure in the midst of a dystopian contemporary landscape, deploying chamber-inspired instrumentation, strings, harp, and woodwinds alongside electronic design. Among his collaborators are M.C. Schmidt, guitarist Bill Orcutt, and an international roster of players. The project continues the Soft Pink Truth’s evolving combination of rigorous composition and generous pop sensibility.
The lead single’s video, an animated and richly textured world crafted by Sullivan and Bennett, underscores Daniel’s visual-first instincts. He has repeatedly made the visual component intrinsic to his releases, and here he uses the visual dimension to deepen the track’s inquiries into time, beauty, and decay. The artist’s choice of collaborators signals both continuity and reinvention: Orcutt’s guitar work implies a shift toward more acoustic, instrumental textures, while the global cast points to an expanded sonic palette.
In the context of Daniel’s broader career, the announcement is striking. Since the early 2000s, The Soft Pink Truth has moved from irreverent club references—its debut re-cast black-metal classics into dance tracks—through more conceptual, ambient, and political phases. Daniel’s academic role as professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and his tenure with Matmos have long informed his music’s intellectual depth. This new album arrives at a moment when dance music and electronic experimentation are increasingly mainstreamed, yet Daniel chooses the margins: one anchored in concept, collaboration, and texture rather than immediate chart ambition.
While chart positions for the new album are yet to be tracked, the announcement has already generated buzz among critics and specialist media. Earlier The Soft Pink Truth releases have received praise for their audacity and inventiveness; here, the thematic underpinning—pleasure in crisis, endurance, and community in collapse—feels particularly timely. In an era when the line between club freedom and global unease is increasingly visible, Daniel’s framing suggests the album may serve as both refuge and critique.
For fans of Matmos, Daniel’s broader work, and the ever-expanding world of experimental electronic pop, "Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever?" represents a moment worth paying attention to. The combination of solo identity, strong label backing, high-profile visual component, and deep conceptual ambition sets the release up as a potential high point in the Soft Pink Truth catalogue. The video for “Time Inside the Violet” already offers a rich sample. With its January release, the album arrives at the start of 2026 with the promise of a work that is intimate, challenging, and resonant.
Whether this record becomes a critical turning point or a cult favorite remains to be seen, but for now it reaffirms Drew Daniel’s position as one of electronic music’s most thoughtful and inventive practitioners. "Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever?" opens a new chapter in "The Soft Pink Truth" story, one where pleasure and crisis, collaboration and solitude, acoustic and electronic are woven together in an entirely Daniel-driven yet globally inflected vision.
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