DARKSIDE PUT THE PIECES BACK TOGETHER AT THE LODGE ROOM
In 1988, Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military regime called a national plebiscite with a precise clarity: “Sí” to keep him in power for eight more years, or “No” to force an open election the following year. This was the same state that disappeared citizens in unmarked vans, that turned stadiums into prisons and living rooms into interrogation rooms, that installed an economic order designed to outlive the man himself. The vote was not an altruistic gesture of generosity. It was a calculated re-legitimization, written directly into the junta’s 1980 constitution—an attempt to secure consent after years of terror, shock doctrine, and enforced silence. The No won, but the Sí lingered—in courts, in institutions, in attitudes, and in the air. The man had left, but the architecture that housed him remained the same.
Nicolas Jaar, born in Chile in the long shadow of that afterimage, has spent much of his musical life searching for a language equal to living among ruins that remain standing. He made that reckoning explicit on his 2016 record Sirens. Its centerpiece, “No,” looks back to that terror and to the plebiscite that unseated Pinochet yet left his system intact, recasting refusal as a warning: “we already said no, but the yes is in everything.” Even when you reject the structure, you still walk through it every day; the real work is not choosing once, but re-choosing, continuously, against a world that keeps trying to say “yes” without your consent.
Since then, Jaar has built a body of music that lives in the seam between fracture and coherence. The way he dissolves himself into club-classics bliss in Against All Logic. The austere ritual of AEAEA with Patrick Higgins. His album-length collaboration with Ali Sethi, Intiha, where Urdu ghazal meets spectral electronics without collapsing into novelty. All of it feels like an attempt to turn brokenness into a form, to rebuild without pretending the break never happened—as if he were practicing a sonic form of kintsugi, where repair is not hidden but illuminated.
Darkside is where that philosophy becomes physical. The project began almost incidentally—Jaar and collaborator Dave Harrington restructuring Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories into the smoky, deconstructed Daftside edits. Something that could have been a one-off revealed a shared temperament: Harrington’s jazz-schooled guitar leaning into drone and negative space (as if it’s only noise), Jaar sculpting absence like clay. Instead of resigning themselves to being a one-off blip in the history of viral musical artifacts, they decided to keep going. With drummer Tlacael Esparza joining the fray, the band’s geometric shape was ossified —three points defining a center that keeps shifting, improvisational but never drifting. Darkside’s own evolving mirror iconography tracks that arc. During Psychic, a literal mirror was the stage centerpiece — reflecting beams of bright light in an otherwise pitch black room; by the end of that era, the mirror shattered (literally). Spiral carried the broken-glass emblem as a living motif, and in the lead-up to Nothing, the mirror returned reassembled—visible seams intact. What was reflected then became fragmented and ultimately reformed, with the lines left in plain sight—a glimmer of light seeping beneath them.
Coachella 2025 © Eric Han
That brings us to three nights at the Lodge Room, two sets a night—early and late—as if repetition were part of the method, a way of asking a room the same question twice to hear how differently it answers. The Lodge Room, once a 1920s Masonic hall for a nearly rural Highland Park and now a sort of Eastside reliquary of curated cool—sitting, kind of hilariously, between a Homestate and a Jeni’s Ice Cream—still holds a ceremonial hush in its bones: arches, carved wood, velvet that swallows light. The crowd skewed toward the familiar Eastside composite: people who alphabetize records and argue whether Deadbeat is DOA; vape clowns and DMT-pen bros who debate whether Zohran Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist or a Communist; and those who wanted a place to dance themselves clean. Whatever brought them there, everyone seemed to carry some private fracture, and the room made that feel normal.
Darkside took the stage without pomp or circumstance. Jaar behind his console, Harrington leaning into his pedalboard, Esparza coaxing the hybrid kit awake. When the first wave of distortion filled the room, pressure seemed to rise—like the room exhaling in reverse. “A1” set the mood as the opening movement, functioning less like a track than a set of conditions under which a strange chemistry could occur. The pulse settled into a patient forward motion, a votive offering to Can, except the motorik beat was shot through with polysynth bombast rather than standard rock-band instrumentation. Harrington’s fretboard explorations traced the perimeter in thin neon lines, smudged now and then with a harmonic squeal to throw the senses off. Jaar treated voice and noise as the same raw material. Esparza kept the rhythm of the ground walkable even as the harmony tugged to the side. The mirrored installation that once graced their stage in previous tours was now gone—as if the metaphor no longer needed to be bludgeoned. What once reflected cleanly now arrived splintered and rejoined, seams intentionally visible.
Where another band might pause to reset, Darkside pivoted into the next movement. “The Limit” leaked through the crack of the last phrase, a low-heat groove that kept refusing to peak—a collective sonic edging of a restless crowd. Esparza’s restraint made the beat breathe; Harrington played as if recalling a melody from a core memory; Jaar blurred his voice into the mix until it functioned like a drum with vowels. The reference points were there if you wanted them, but the attitude was contemporary. “Graucha Max,” a standout cut from their latest record, Nothing, behaved like an unexpected rainstorm: a steady undertow with everything above it changing shape. The bass line bounced with that rubbery, hand-played minimalism Liquid Liquid used to ride—only here it felt as if Liquid Liquid had been run through a Big Muff, the grit left audible, the edges fattened until they became part of an atonal rhythm. Somewhere in the stretch, Jaar’s political throughline surfaced—not as an explicit screed, but as tonal architecture. This was structure-strained but not collapsed; temperance without asceticism; the yes and the no coexisting in the same measure.
Midway through the set, “Freak, Go Home” stopped pretending to be a big-room drop and instead gathered a rising heat by attrition, as it let a dub-streaked shadow pass over the room until the tempo felt like a held breath. By then, the audience had learned not only to live inside an unresolved thought but also to derive pleasure from it. After a brief pause while Jaar fixed a technical issue, the band finished its 90-minute marathon with “Paper Trails”—the closest thing they have to a singalong. The guitar line took the scenic route, the vocal sat darker and closer to the floor, and the whole thing read like a thesis statement: the pieces don’t go back the way they were, but we try to put them back together, nonetheless.
For the length of the set, the Lodge Room became a place where a collective fracture could be held. As Jaar bled deeper into deliberate dissonance, it was clear the band wasn’t selling a simple cure. The potency of Darkside is good company amidst chaos—a temporary commons where people living on multiple fault lines sit with the unrelenting dread of what feels unsolvable. Darkside doesn’t offer easy listening any more than they provide easy answers. They offer attention—and as Sister Sarah Joan says, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
Earlier this year at Coachella, Jaar paused mid-set to speak about our era’s most volatile and immoral failures—Palestine, ICE detention sites, and even the corporate scaffolding underwriting the festival—saying simply, “This is not the time to look away.” While the naysayers would accuse Jaar of being cynical, the reality is that it’s an authentic continuation of the same refusal that runs through Sirens, through “No,” through his collaborations and detours and disappearances from the spotlight—the belief that music cannot be separated from the world that scars it. Some cheered, some bristled; the difference had less to do with ideology than whether the crowd had already agreed to hold tension together.
In Highland Park, they had. When the lights finally rose, people didn’t sprint for the door; they hovered, reluctant to leave a room that had become, for ninety minutes, what W.H. Auden called a place where “ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages.” The mirror wasn’t restored and the cracks remained, but the seams—gold and present—were enough to light the way out.
