Mellow Code unveils video for ‘Victory in Death’
LA darkwave project Mellow Code releases a music video for “Victory in Death,” directed by Adrian Stucker and Daniel Maggio and shot in the high desert.
Mellow Code
Los Angeles darkwave project Mellow Code has released a music video for “Victory in Death,” a track originally issued in October 2025. The video, shot in the high desert, is out now on the band’s own channels.
Mellow Code is led by Josh McVety and Oliver Michael German. The project’s sound mixes mechanical rhythms, new-wave vocals, EBM and house with bright FM synthesis, built around samples recorded in the group’s own fabrication workshop in Alhambra, California.
“Victory in Death” opens with processional drums and a mass of synthesizers before buzzing, bit-crushed electronics and shuddering samples take over the arrangement. McVety’s vocal sits between lament and command across the track, which addresses masculinity, conditioning and self-erasure. Mellow Code describes the song as one “evoking the feeling of growing up the way American culture targets boys,” adding that the piece was written against “a cycle of abuse” in which “boys police each other and the most conservative minded lash out at the perceived threats to that sense of ‘natural order.'”
The accompanying video turns that theme into a nocturnal desert scene. A group dressed in leather, mesh and workwear builds mallets, spears and a truck-mounted slingshot around a campfire, then uses the handmade arsenal to destroy a painted wooden dummy built to represent inherited ideas of manhood. McVety appears throughout, intercut with scenes shot from inside a van.
McVety, who also works as a carpenter and fabricator, describes the shoot as a collaboration with his own circle of artists: “This video was an absolute labor of love that was entirely done with and by my community of artist friends. I wanted to recapture what it felt like to be a kid when me and my freak friends would make weapons and contraptions and forts inspired by whatever movie we had just seen and often Jack Ass. We built weapons and made a truck into a giant slingshot. I made a wooden dummy and my friends painted it. It was a party in the desert with the people closest to me.”
The video was photographed and co-directed by Adrian Stucker of Melankolia, with Daniel Maggio serving as co-director and editor, and color by Grady Colors. It stars McVety alongside Eli Gray, Matt Hanson, Miranda Sharp and Eric Runner. Stucker describes the shoot’s visual approach as combining “the rebellious, youthful energy of The Lost Boys with the rugged, weathered aesthetic of desert-faring pirates,” noting that a single hard lighting source was used throughout to carve out high-contrast imagery against the desert landscape.
“Victory in Death” is streaming on Bandcamp and Spotify.
About Mellow Code
Mellow Code is an avant-garde darkwave project led by Los Angeles-based artist Josh McVety together with Oliver Michael German. The project builds its sound from mechanical rhythms, new-wave vocals, EBM and house elements combined with bright FM synthesis, and works samples gathered from McVety’s own fabrication workshop directly into its arrangements, developing an industrial club language in which handmade devices function as instruments as well as imagery.
The project’s catalogue includes the album “Objekt Reality” alongside standalone tracks such as “Ich stehe im Blut,” “Face It,” “Antworte” and “Bestraft für Leben,” along with the collaborative track “Knives” with SKM/LKR and the remix “Filed To Knubbs (Male Tears Remix).” “Victory in Death” was released in October 2025 and has now been paired with a video built around the same themes of masculinity and self-imposed conditioning that run through the track, continuing Mellow Code’s pattern of pairing its music with handmade, workshop-built visual production, as seen previously in the video for “Face It.”
Mellow Code can be followed on Facebook, Instagram, Spotify and Bandcamp.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
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