All The Damn Vampires – VICECORE and the Rise of Synth Noir

Some albums feel less like a collection of songs and more like a urban place you can enter.

On VICECORE, All The Damn Vampires build a neon-noir soundscape where 1980s arena rock emotion drifts through futuristic atmospheres.

Text by Marcel CHAOS — Original Article, Area Orbital (Brazil), 2026.

All The Damn Vampires

Some nights feel as if they were taken straight from a neon-noir film.

And some bands seem to exist precisely to soundtrack those nights.

It is striking to realise that a sound so deeply inspired by the 1980s — filled with emotion and nostalgia — could come from a musician associated with bands from the 1990s and 2000s, particularly the alternative wave of nu-metal that emerged after the decline of classic eighties rock aesthetics.

And yet Davey Oberlin delivers exactly what an admirer of that era like myself would hope to hear.

His experience working with bands such as Korn and Five Finger Death Punch gives the project All The Damn Vampires a distinctive edge. The force of the guitars brings a modern weight to the music while illuminating the nostalgic core of the proposal.

With that in mind, let us step into the album.

VICECORE

Imagine a nocturnal landscape — something close to a neon-noir film. The city murmurs around you: distant traffic, urban echoes, flickers of light. The opening track, “Welcome to Los Angeles,” immediately establishes that setting.

Its function is simple and effective: it builds the nocturnal city as the visual and sonic environment of the entire record.

The result is that VICECORE unfolds as a kind of nocturnal AOR — a space where the 1980s encounter the present moment. Guitar solos carry expressive feeling, emotional vocals rise above the mix, and everything floats within a sonic atmosphere wrapped in futuristic synth textures.

The title track “VICECORE,” featuring producer Sunglasses Kid, moves toward the arena-rock spirit associated with bands such as Asia, Journey and 38 Special. Here, however, the style is filtered through a futuristic electronic palette.

Synths and guitars saturate the sound with textures that evoke the tension of a night where something unsettling may be hiding beneath the surface.

Ryan Rose’s vocals suggest an intriguing blend of Sting and Phil Collins — though tinged with a certain nervous urgency that follows the synthwave pulse sustaining the melody.

The cover of “Is This Love” features the guitarist Andy James (Five Finger Death Punch) and appears amid atmospheric pads and deepens the album’s cinematic urban atmosphere. The Whitesnake classic fits surprisingly well within the sonic architecture of VICECORE.

Sung with clear nostalgic affection and respectful of the original composition, the synthwave framework subtly shifts the experience: instead of returning to the past, the song seems to drift toward a speculative future.

At times the music feels almost distant, as if transmitted from a radio station somewhere beyond Earth. Within this landscape, synthwave artists often discover unexpected ways to renew the language of rock — particularly AOR, hard rock, progressive rock and even heavier metal traditions.

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More melodic moments appear throughout the record. “Falling Into the Darkness,” featuring Jack Underkofler from Dead Poet Society, introduces a more pop-oriented melodic sensibility. Its measured vocal delivery creates a brief pause before “Into the Night,” which continues the album’s sonic architecture.

Here the rhythm remains controlled, but heavier riffs emerge with a modern tone — a subtle echo of Oberlin’s background in heavy metal and the Korn lineage.

Choir-like vocal arrangements expand behind the lead voice while dense synth layers continue to fill the background. In fact, the production maintains this sense of fullness across nearly the entire album.

Even with these traces of metalcore and nu-metal heritage, All The Damn Vampires constantly evokes the atmosphere of the 1980s — something like Foreigner projected into an imagined future.

Neon Noir Architecture

Gradually, VICECORE reveals itself as a conceptual album. Its themes, sonic textures and fragments of urban noise intertwine to form a coherent atmosphere. The listening experience becomes almost visual.

Within this environment the record moves toward a darker direction of synthwave — what might be called a synth-noir aesthetic, where the city, urban solitude and quiet drama coexist.

Track by track, the album reveals careful construction. Synthesizers shift between atmospheric, spatial and occasionally ominous pads. Clear vocals emerge through heavy guitar riffs reminiscent of the European hard-rock lineage associated with projects such as Phenomena II (Dream Runner).

At certain moments the backing vocals expand into choral textures, recalling techniques once used by bands like Dokken.

Yet throughout the record the technical craft serves the music itself rather than instrumental display. Virtuosity remains present, but never becomes sterile.

Listening to the album feels like moving through a city at night — a kind of cinematic drift. One could imagine a noir film unfolding, where something within the darkness waits to be understood.

The track “Homesick” represents the peak of that sensation. A nocturnal saxophone appears alongside crickets, distant dogs and footsteps. At this point it feels as though the investigation has reached its turning point — as if the hidden mystery behind the atmosphere finally reveals itself.

The damn vampires!

They seem responsible for the entire sonic disturbance: opening strange portals between musical environments, stirring the nocturnal city into motion.

Sometimes the album becomes tense. Sometimes it relaxes into reflective passages. At other moments it feels like the perfect soundtrack for a solitary drive through the early hours of the morning.

In fact, the music almost mirrors the album cover itself — a clear Miami Vice-like image: flashing police lights, a crime somewhere nearby, two detectives standing in the foreground.

Midnight Encounters

From this point the album becomes more intimate. The listener begins to inhabit the soundscape rather than merely observe it.

Then, midway through “From Here,” a subtle shift occurs. The keyboards gradually take on an atmosphere reminiscent of The X-Files. A rough, off-frequency drone emerges, setting the stage for the guitars to return with renewed intensity.

The track becomes a bridge toward another iconic eighties cover: “In the Air Tonight,” originally by Phil Collins.

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Here the album enters its deepest neon midnight. Guitars become sharper, and the cinematic tension intensifies — almost as if unseen figures were approaching like distant sirens in the night.

The production carefully echoes the original track’s vocoder textures while remaining respectful of the classic composition. At the same time, the sound design introduces a sense of almost three-dimensional danger — as though the listener had stepped inside the film itself.

The album closes with “Sunset Over the Final Chapter.” Guitarist Miles Dimitri Baker (Ice Nine Kills) delivers a striking solo that gives the finale the weight of a classic heavy-metal ending — precisely the kind of dramatic closure Oberlin seems to have envisioned for the project.

The result is a debut that feels bold without relying on formula.

The Rockwave spirit

The strength of the release appears less in retro imitation than in its structural tension and emotional rhythm. For a first album, it is an impressive achievement.

At Area Orbital we sometimes refer to this hybrid between synthwave and metal as Rockwave — a label that acknowledges how difficult it becomes to separate the two genres once their sonic languages merge so completely.

With three covers — “Is This Love” (Whitesnake), “In the Air Tonight” (Phil Collins) and “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” (Cutting Crew) — All The Damn Vampires offers a clear tribute to the decade that once imagined the future.

VICECORE ultimately sounds like a nocturnal city imagined by the 1980s — inhabited by guitars, synthesizers … and vampires.

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This article is an original, human-authored work by Marcel CHAOS.
Reproduction of this content, in whole or in part, is not permitted without prior authorization.

• Area Orbital® is an independent publication dedicated to Retrowave music and 1980s culture.