Song You Need: Decisive Pink play with fate

“Destiny” is the lead single from Ticket To Fame, the debut LP from the duo of Angel Deradoorian and Kate NV.

February 28, 2023

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It’s always tricky to traffic in tropes. But if anyone is capable of pulling off an informed yet lighthearted homage to fortunetelling, it’s Angel Deradoorian and Kate NV. “Destiny,” the lead single from their debut album as Decisive Pink, treads a narrow track. Featuring pentatonic interludes, eerie electronica, and quaint rhyme schemes — “Have no fear / The prophesy is clear / Truth to tell / I’m whispering a spell” — it teeters on the precipice of poor pastiche but never quite falls. The song is saved by the same things that make Deradoorian and NV’s outside work so strong: intuitive, fluid lyrics (Deradoorian); irresistible, city pop-indebted grooves (NV); and analog synth arrangements that are ingeniously crafted but never too clever for their own good (both).

NV, the multi-talented Muscovite who has a solo LP of her own (her fourth) due out Friday, and Deradoorian, the similarly prolific soloist who cut her teeth with Dirty Projectors in the late aughts, officially announced the founding of their duo in in the fall and consummated the marriage in December with their first joint single, “Haffmilch Holiday.” But they’ve been collaborating sporadically since meeting at Red Bull Music Academy Tokyo in 2014 and bonding over a mutual love of all things modular and synthetic. And they started performing as Decisive Pink, albeit rarely, as early as 2018. Ticket To Fame, the freshly promised fruit of all those years of reciprocal orbit, is scheduled to drop June 9 via Fire Records.

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Watch the appropriately cabalistic music video for “Destiny,” directed by Sasha Kulak, above.

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Song You Need: Decisive Pink play with fate