The long-awaited debut album from Naarm/Melbourne-based project Double Happiness is out now. Titled Derealisation, the record arrives after a year of steady momentum — six singles, a growing live presence, and a reputation for weaving dark, synth-soaked textures into something personal, eerie, and strangely familiar.
The project is the work of Sam Jemsek, a multi-instrumentalist who wrote, recorded, mixed and produced the album solo in his bedroom, before handing it off to Mikey Young for mastering.
And no, before you ask — that’s not Cole Hauser from Yellowstone on the press photo. But yeah, the vibe’s not far off. If Rip Wheeler ditched the ranch and made vaporous goth records in a Brunswick sharehouse, this might be it.
At its core, Derealisation is about perception slipping. Jemsek describes the album as “a catalogue of different realities,” where each song plays out like “a different brain looking at the same thing. Sometimes it’s a machine, sometimes it’s an animal, sometimes it’s just me after sleeping weird.”
The themes are cohesive, even as the tones shift: digital alienation, the uneasy boundary between the physical and the virtual, and the quiet horrors of everyday life. The full track-by-track commentary (included below) lays out the details, but in essence, Derealisation is an attempt to document a shared but hard-to-define experience — that creeping sensation, post-2020, that something fundamental has shifted and the outside world has lost some of its solidity.
“There was a turning point a few years ago where the vibe of everything got really weird, and never completely went back,” Jemsek explains. “You could still go outside, and still do things in the world, but everyone knew that the important and legitimate stuff was happening online somewhere else… the physical world around you was just one of many content streams.”
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Tracks like Electric Sheep and Blindsight explore these concepts through androids, hallucinated ghosts, and dream logic. Others, like December Curse or Morning Light, skew darker but add a streak of dry humor — the kind that keeps creeping back in when you’ve been awake too long.
Musically, the record blends post-punk, shoegaze, goth and darkwave, but it’s less about genre and more about atmosphere. Jemsek draws influence from Molchat Doma, Boy Harsher, and Buzz Kull, but also from structurally adventurous albums like Typical System by Total Control or J Dilla’s Donuts — not for their sound, but their freedom.
Jemsek treats the album as a single evolving composition, repeating motifs across tracks, letting one dissolve into another before pulling the thread elsewhere. Tracks like Dark Matters, Worthwhile and Staring at the Walls return in reworked form, cast in new emotional light, creating a sense of déjà vu by design.
Derealisation captures the fragmented state many now recognize as ordinary: a kind of static between memories, screens, sleepless nights, and surreal moments that feel more “real” than anything physical.
Full track by track commentary below.
Electric Sheep:
I was listening to a lot of 80s synthpop and new wave when I wrote this one, and I wanted to have some rich sweeping chords like The Wake used in Melancholy Man. The lyrics are about some kind of android or artificial person. They’ve been programmed to think they’re human using fake memories, like a replicant in Blade Runner, but their human programming can’t seem to understand why they don’t have a body that eats and sleeps.
These ideas must have been seeping into the back of my mind for the rework, because I couldn’t get the image from the Encarta ‘95 CD Rom out of my head. That’s why the lead sound is a lot more computery than in the first iteration. That combined with the almost Midwest Emo chords for the chorus tell the story about as well as the music could hope to, I think.
Blindsight:
Once in a while you get an uncanny feeling that if you roll over in bed, you’ll see someone there lying next to you, even if no one else is in the house. I ran with that idea a bit, and imagined a widow being visited by the spirit of their deceased loved one. They know that it can’t be real, but with eyes closed, it feels close enough.
The music was meant to be a lot darker sounding. I was trying to recreate a bassline from The KVB, but no matter what I did, it sounded bright and peaceful, so it seemed like a good opportunity to use those romantic lyrics.
Dark Matters:
A lot like Blindsight, this is another insomniac rumination, this time about trying to push out old memories while falling asleep. I was imagining an aging person who had done some terrible things during wartime or something, who was trying to keep the thoughts at bay during the night.
The rework of this is a lot more intricate, with some arpeggios in the bass and a bit more drum arrangement. The driving quality of it casts the story in a more urgent light – it’s as if the first version is a kind of sigh of defeat, and this later one is more of a resolution to act.
December Curse:
A witch-looking lady in a shawl gave me a weird look through my window on a rainy evening in December 2023, and everything went terribly for months after. I’m sure it was a coincidence, but every time I’d have a bit of bad luck, I couldn’t help but picture her face and laugh a little at how ridiculous the situation was.
The song is half serious, but I guess it’s also a bit of a private joke, because of all the ways to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, a curse from a spooky witch is probably the most outrageous dodge you could ever do.
Artificial Sun:
I had a massive YMO phase when I was in school, and I think that was actually where the love of synths may have started. I wanted this track to be something like Ryuichi Sakamoto recreating Idioteque in a deep cave. Actually the whole melody came from trying to remember how to play the pentatonic scale on the keyboard, and just mashing the whole scale at once to make a drone.
The lyrics are basically about how confusing it must be for pets to hear different animals on the TV. Sometimes they’ll go behind the screen to inspect the sound and look they’ll look absolutely baffled when nothing is there. It seemed poignant at the time, but I don’t really think so now.
Znamya 2:
In the early 90s, the Soviet Union launched a satellite into space with a huge banner to reflect the sun onto the fields, compelling people to continue doing outdoor work through the night. I happened to be romanticising the past at the time I learned this, casting it in an artificial light of another kind. So in the end, this one is just about living in a fantasy.
I wanted the music to sound kind of like a blast of light. I was aiming for something like A Place To Bury Strangers or Pinkshinyultrablast – fast and intense shoegaze with too much happening to fully take in at any one moment.
I recently learned that I pronounce the word “Znamya” wrong dozens of times in this song because I listened to Google translate.
Morning Light:
Sometimes you’re out on the town and you meet someone who you’re sure is going to kill you given half a chance. You make sure to lock your doors once you get home, and sleep lightly, planning your strategy in case you hear the gate rattle.
The point of this one was to see if I could dress up some of the more mundane terrors of the world in a very over-the-top, classic Goth Rock outfit and see what happened.
There’s a spoken word part in the bridge which is essentially me imagining someone at Bunnings buying the equipment to pick my locks. Like the rest of the album, I hope that it comes across as a little bit disturbing but mostly funny.
Sleep Paralysis:
I had a dream where I was a werewolf, and when I woke up, I was really concerned that I would fall in with a pack of dogs and end up eating someone.
That didn’t eventuate, but this song is really just about times when the right thing to do is nothing at all- and lock yourself in a barn until things cool down, because you can only make things worse.
I wrote this before I had heard A Place To Bury Strangers, and I thought I had invented this kind of song. Needless to say I was devastated when I finally heard Exploding Head 7 or so years later.
Worthwhile:
The mother of Shinzo Abe’s assassin was involved in a religious cult, and Abe’s endorsement of this organisation was what the killer said had motivated him.
The way the gunman described the ruin that his mother’s involvement brought to their family made me really wonder what people get out of these groups.
I wanted this one to sound like a chant or a sutra. I tried to sing it in a detached way, like someone in a trance, and let the guitars handle the violent and aggressive parts.
Staring At The Walls:
I was trying to do something like Joy Division with a touch of Vaporwave on this one, and I wanted to see if I could make half of it really understated, and the other half completely ridiculous and cheesy.
If it’s about anything, it’s about how the longer you hide from the world, the scarier and more overwhelming it becomes. Just a friendly reminder to take a walk once in a while.
