Mildreda interview: ‘Sometimes vulnerability can be extremely violent’

With “Realities”, Jan Dewulf does something more interesting than simply broaden Mildreda‘s sound. He removes one of the most recognisable elements of “Blue-Devilled” altogether: there is not a single sacred sample on the new album. The quasi-liturgical weight of its predecessor gives way to colder electronics, sharper industrial abrasion and passages that move considerably closer to noise. At the same time, the writing becomes more exposed, allowing tenderness, ageing, regret, loneliness and vulnerability into Mildreda without translating any of them into softness.

Scheduled for release on August 28 through Dependent Records, “Realities” is an 18-track double album, also issued as a limited 2CD artbook with 48 pages designed by Henk Willems. Recurring “Reality Checks” run through its structure; Constantin “Breñal” Warter of Calva Y Nada appears on “Rückwärts”, while Suicide Commando‘s Johan Van Roy joins “Virtual Goddess”. Where “Blue-Devilled” worked explicitly with Sartre, “Realities” turns towards Camus and Sisyphus: falling, rebuilding and the uncomfortable recognition that a life does not unfold inside one stable reality, but through successive versions of it.

In this conversation, that idea moves far beyond philosophy as an intellectual reference. Dewulf talks about reaching middle age and the lives no longer available to us, why the “Reality Checks” function like the seams in kintsugi, social media complicity, the strange persistence of gods after belief disappears, and why increased vulnerability pushed Mildreda towards more violent sound rather than away from it. The result is also a remarkably precise account of an artist who says he is no longer searching for Mildreda’s identity; he is now interested in finding out how far that identity can be stretched before it stops being Mildreda.

Mildreda interview

Karo: Jan, when we first spoke in 2021, you told me that maturity had finally allowed you to “come home” with Mildreda. I have followed the project ever since, through “I Was Never Really There”, “Blue-Devilled”, the concerts and now “Realities”, and this record gives me almost the opposite impression: you sound secure enough in Mildreda to start dismantling parts of the language you had established. How much did making “Realities” require you to question your own idea of what Mildreda is supposed to sound like?

Jan: You could argue that making music, playing in a band, writing lyrics and creating a story around it will always be a journey of exploration. But the nature of that journey has definitely changed. I’m no longer searching for Mildreda’s identity, and by now I feel I’ve figured out the DNA of the project as well. That foundation is there, and it’s solid. And precisely because of that, I can now embark on more adventurous quests: exploring the boundaries of the Mildreda sound, allowing for a broader emotional range, and seeing how far I can stretch things without losing what makes Mildreda what it is. I think that’s something you can clearly hear on “Realities”.

Karo: When you sent me the album, you described it as your most emotional work and said there were “more colours in the music than ever”. Having heard it, I think the interesting thing is that those colours are certainly not all softer ones. There is industrial abrasion, noise, harsher vocals, but also enormous electronic detail, space and moments of delicacy. When you speak about colour in music, what exactly does that mean to you? Is it timbre, emotional range, dynamics, harmonic language, or the freedom to allow contradictory emotional states to exist within the same musical vocabulary?

Jan: When I said it was my most emotional album, I also, and perhaps primarily, meant that on a lyrical level. I allowed myself to explore themes and emotions that are rather unusual within a genre like dark electro. I deliberately moved beyond the genre’s more traditional themes of pain, anger and darkness, making room for vulnerability and tenderness instead. That vulnerability sometimes finds its way into the music as well, in quieter, more emotional and delicate passages that are relatively new territory for Mildreda. But at the same time, I really pushed the boundaries in the opposite direction too, exploring noisier, harsher and more abrasive territory than before. So in that sense, those additional colours aren’t necessarily softer ones. It’s more about widening the entire emotional and sonic spectrum of what Mildreda can be.

Karo: The distance from “Blue-Devilled” is wide. That album had an almost architectural darkness, with quasi-sacral space, ritual weight and gothic grandeur, whereas “Realities” feels more corporeal, metallic and exposed. The church-like atmosphere has largely disappeared even though the philosophical conflict has not. Did the change in subject matter make that previous sonic language inappropriate, or had you simply reached the point where you no longer needed those symbols to create darkness?

Jan: Especially in Mildreda’s early days in the 1990s, that sacred element was an important part of the sound. I was heavily influenced by bands like Will, early Delerium and In Slaughter Natives, who incorporated bombastic samples of sacred chants into their dark electronic compositions. That whole wave of inspiration came back in full force while making “Blue-Devilled”, so much so that the album is packed with grandiose, sacral samples. One fan joked that if he took a shot of jenever every time he heard a monk singing on “Blue-Devilled”, he’d be completely drunk by the end of the album. He had a point: we may have overdone it a little. So with “Realities”, it was a very conscious decision not to use a single sacred sample anywhere on the album. This time, I wanted the darkness to come from a colder, more purely electronic sound.

Karo: “Blue-Devilled” entered into dialogue with Sartre, particularly his idea of hell in relation to the gaze and judgement of other people. “Realities” moves towards Camus, which changes the philosophical problem considerably: from the self confronted by another consciousness towards the collision between our need for meaning and a world that does not promise to provide it. Why did Camus become relevant to you now, and was that movement philosophical first or biographical first?

Jan: At its heart, “Realities” is about falling down and finding the strength to get back up again. Throughout our lives, we keep having to rediscover and rebuild ourselves after setbacks, whether they are small or life-changing. And we have to do all of that within the brief interlude we are granted in this universe: our finite lives. That is where Camus entered the picture. In many ways, “Realities” became a confrontation with the absurd. Echoing Camus and his comparison of the human condition to the fate of Sisyphus, the album revolves around that endless cycle of falling and rising, breaking and rebuilding, and forcing ourselves to create new versions of reality. We search for meaning even though the universe offers us no guarantee that there is any to be found. And yet we keep moving. That is also exactly what the title “Realities” refers to. We don’t live in one single, fixed reality, but in a succession of realities. With every setback, every decision and every new beginning, we become a slightly different version of ourselves and inhabit a slightly different world.

Visually, that journey is beautifully reflected in Henk Willems’ artwork, where nature slowly reclaims what was once broken. Moss spreads across abandoned ruins, while new growth gradually softens the scars of destruction. To me, it became a powerful metaphor for the album itself: not simply a story of collapse, but of renewal. Not of defeat, but of return.

Karo: Camus famously concludes “The Myth of Sisyphus” with “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”, but your Sisyphus in “End of the Line” carries something rather more specific: biography. “Forty-five, fifty-five / This is the time of your life”, followed by those “thousand lives you never led”, introduces age, memory and unrealised possibility into the cycle. Returning to the beginning at fifty cannot mean returning to the same beginning as at twenty because the person pushing the rock has accumulated knowledge, losses and consequences. Does your Sisyphus still arrive at something resembling Camus’s freedom through lucidity, or are you questioning whether accepting the absurd is enough once time itself has become part of the burden?

Jan: The initial spark was actually something very personal. Not that long ago, when I turned 45, someone told me, “You’re about to enter the ten best years of your life.” Whether that’s true or not is impossible to say, of course, but there was something strangely powerful about that thought. It almost felt like an obligation to make those years count. That naturally led me back to questions that have always fascinated me: the fact that life is finite, that our time is limited, and that with age comes an increasing awareness of all the lives we could have lived but didn’t. At twenty, there still seems to be an almost infinite number of possible futures ahead of you. Later in life, some of those possibilities have inevitably disappeared. Choices have been made, things have been lost, and time itself becomes part of the weight you carry. That is where Camus and Sisyphus became particularly relevant to “End of the Line”. Sisyphus keeps pushing his boulder despite knowing that it will inevitably roll back down. To me, that endless cycle of falling, getting back up and starting again is a very powerful metaphor for life. We all have our own rock to push uphill, and somehow we keep going. So can Sisyphus still be happy while carrying that rock up the mountain again and again? I think, with Camus, that he can. Despite our mortality and the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence, we still have the freedom to create our own stories, to find joy and to give meaning to the limited time we have. Perhaps age doesn’t contradict Camus’s idea of freedom at all; it simply makes it more urgent. We’d better start pushing, living and creating meaning now, because at some point, the time really does run out.

Karo: Musically, I hear more industrial language on “Realities” than on any previous Mildreda album, sometimes moving into very raw, almost noise-like territory. “Rückwärts” is particularly severe and fragmented, but that hardness runs through much of the record in the percussion, distortion, chopped structures and increasingly sharp vocal attack. What led you towards these harsher materials? Did you consciously pursue abrasion as part of the production language, and were there moments when you had to resist making a sound cleaner because its discomfort was exactly what the song required?

Jan: That direction actually emerged quite naturally. But it is true that, with this album, I consciously wanted the music to be less immediately digestible than on the previous record. Musically, “Realities” has far more sharp edges, rough textures and moments of genuine abrasion. Perhaps I had been a little too cautious before, whereas this time I allowed myself to go all the way.

There is a certain duality at the heart of the album in that respect: very harsh, abrasive music intertwined with vulnerability in the lyrics and themes. That contrast has always fascinated me. Nine Inch Nails taught me that industrial music can be layered with vulnerability without losing any of its power or aggression. If anything, the two can reinforce each other.

Karo: At the same time, reducing “Realities” to its aggression would completely misrepresent it because this is also an extraordinarily elaborate electronic record. Across the album, sounds accumulate, separate, change depth and move around one another; dense structures can suddenly open and allow a small sample, voice or electronic detail to occupy an enormous amount of psychological space. How differently were you thinking about density, depth and layering this time, and how do you know when complexity is intensifying an emotion rather than beginning to hide it?

Jan: First of all, thank you for describing our music so beautifully. I’m genuinely happy that I was able to take you along on that musical journey in that way. For me, every track is a new search for the right sound and the right balance. And I love that process. I find it incredibly rewarding to spend hours in the studio working with synths and samples, tweaking sounds and layers until they evoke exactly the feeling I’m looking for. There’s something wonderful about that moment when, after endless tweaking, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fall into place. This time, there simply seemed to be more puzzle pieces than ever, all demanding their own space. That’s one of the reasons why “Realities” ultimately needed to become a double album. I secretly hope that listeners will surrender to that journey from beginning to end: eighteen tracks moving through very different moods, textures and sonic landscapes. For me, the complexity only works when all those layers ultimately serve that journey and the emotion behind it.

Karo: The “Reality Checks” are one of the strongest compositional ideas on the album. I do not hear them as conventional interludes because they do not merely separate the larger songs or give us recovery time. They make the whole record feel interwoven, almost braided: the substantial compositions form one strand, these smaller pieces enter between them, and gradually the relationship between the two becomes part of the album’s architecture. When did you realise that “Realities” needed this structure, and what makes an idea a “Reality Check” rather than something that develops into a full Mildreda song?

Jan: The idea of using interludes was there from the very beginning. I wanted something that would weave the individual songs together and make the album feel like one continuous journey rather than simply a collection of tracks. Albums like “Entities” by Project Pitchfork and “Galleries of Pain” by Placebo Effect were important references in that respect. Gradually, those interludes developed a character of their own and became the “Reality Checks”. I started to see them almost as the golden seams in kintsugi: they sit between the larger pieces, but rather than simply separating them, they bind the fractured parts into a new whole. Some echo or distort elements from the songs around them, some contain vocals, while others became little sonic adventures of their own. And perhaps that is what distinguishes a “Reality Check” from a full Mildreda song. It doesn’t need to arrive anywhere or tell a complete story. It can remain fragmentary: suggest something, disturb the balance for a moment and then disappear. Its incompleteness is part of its purpose.

Karo: Their placement also gives the album something almost physiological, like a heartbeat. Pressure accumulates, then comes a caesura, a moment of recalibration, and movement resumes. Yet the “Reality Checks” are not predictable moments of relief; sometimes they open the music and allow it to breathe, while elsewhere they make the footing even less secure. In ordinary life, a reality check is exactly such a moment: the narrative we have been living inside is interrupted and we are forced to take stock of where we actually stand. Afterwards the external circumstances may be identical, but our perception of them has changed. Is that also what these pieces are doing, repeatedly altering the position from which we perceive the music around them, and perhaps offering another way of understanding the plural title “Realities”?

Jan: Yes, very much so. I like your description of them as moments of recalibration, because that is exactly how I see a reality check in life as well. Something happens that briefly disrupts the story you have been telling yourself. The world may still be exactly the same afterwards, but your position within it has shifted. That connects directly to the central idea of “Realities”. We fall, we rise, we rebuild ourselves, and each time we do, we are forced into a slightly different version of reality. There is no single fixed perspective from which we experience our lives. Our perception constantly changes through loss, experience, decisions and new beginnings. “Reality Checks” translate that idea into the architecture of the album. They interrupt the flow and slightly reposition the listener before the next piece begins. And importantly, as you point out, they are not always moments of relief. Sometimes a reality check brings clarity; sometimes it only makes things more confusing. But either way, something has shifted. You continue the journey from a different position than before. And yes, in that sense they are very closely connected to the plural in “Realities”: there is never just one reality to return to.

Karo: You told me that the material grew into a double album, yet for you it still tells one story. That is a difficult structural problem: eighteen pieces, radically different degrees of intensity and a very broad electronic vocabulary could easily become abundance without coherence. At what point did you understand that you were not making two albums, or an album with supplementary pieces? What makes “Realities” one work for you: narrative, emotional continuity, musical recurrence, or something that only exists through the sequence itself?

Jan: There was also a very practical starting point. New albums on Dependent are nowadays released as beautiful, exclusive hardcover artbooks with two CDs. I’m a big fan of that format, but I’m not necessarily a big fan of the idea that the second disc automatically has to become a collection of bonus material. I didn’t feel like inviting a dozen remixers for this one. This had to remain my story. So in a way, I was quite happy to discover that I simply had too much to say for a single CD. There were so many musical ideas, moods and little sonic adventures that all felt integral to the same universe. Cutting them down just to fit the conventional length of an album would have felt more artificial than allowing the record to expand. And there was a reassuring precedent, of course. Nine Inch Nails showed with “The Fragile” that a double album can be an extraordinary work in its own right rather than an album plus an appendix. That record gave me confidence that abundance doesn’t necessarily have to come at the expense of coherence. For me, “Realities” is ultimately one big story. Despite the range of sounds, moods and emotions, everything belongs to the same conceptual journey: falling, rebuilding, shifting perspective and entering another reality. The “Reality Checks” help bind that journey together, but ultimately I think the coherence exists in the sequence itself. I hope the listener experiences those eighteen pieces not as separate destinations, but as chapters in one long journey through constantly changing emotional and sonic landscapes.

Karo: In our first interview you described songwriting as a way of exorcising your demons. “Realities”, however, seems less protected by symbolic architecture than some of the earlier material. “Damage Done”, “Clair-Obscur” and “End of the Line” allow loneliness, emotional asymmetry, ageing, regret and exhaustion to remain recognisably human rather than disguising them completely as theology or elaborate metaphor. Has becoming more personal also changed your relationship with abstraction? At what point does transforming an experience protect the song, and at what point does it protect the writer too much?

Jan: That is something that happened quite naturally and evolved over time. Initially, Your Life On Hold was the project where I allowed myself to reveal more of my soul and dig deeper into personal emotions, while Mildreda was primarily the place where I wanted to be loud, confrontational and channel aggression. But gradually, while writing new material, I found myself digging deeper with Mildreda as well. I started allowing a much broader emotional range into the project and became less dependent on abstraction or metaphor to express what I wanted to say. I think that also has a lot to do with becoming more confident as a songwriter. I no longer feel the need to hide behind anything. If there is something I want to say, I can say it openly and without disguise. And what changed with “Realities” is that I discovered I can do that within Mildreda too, without compromising what Mildreda is.

Karo: You mentioned Nine Inch Nails to me while explaining the direction of this record, particularly the possibility of allowing vulnerability and emotional depth to coexist with intensity and noise. On “Realities”, vulnerability rarely means making the music gentler; quite often exposure seems to make it more violent. Did that become a compositional principle in itself, that tenderness, humiliation, rage, longing and industrial aggression do not need separate musical languages because they can actually originate from the same emotional state?

Jan: What is vulnerable, fragile and delicate is also more susceptible to pain, and I think you can hear that throughout the album. There is a lot of sadness, underlying pain and unanswered longing on “Realities”. Those emotions don’t necessarily ask for gentle music. Sometimes vulnerability can be extremely violent precisely because there is so little protection around it. The best way for me to translate that duality into music was therefore sometimes to work with very dissonant, abrasive and explosive sounds. Tenderness and aggression don’t have to be opposites; they can grow out of exactly the same emotional state. That constant interplay between light and shadow runs through the entire album, I think. The fragile moments make the harsh ones more painful, and the harshness in turn makes the vulnerability feel even more exposed.

Karo: The collaborators introduce another interesting contradiction. In 2023 you told me that with “Blue-Devilled” you deliberately wanted to undertake the creative process yourself, partly because after previous collaborations you needed to demonstrate that you could stand alone artistically. “Realities”, which you consider much more personal, opens the door again: Constantin Warter of Calva Y Nada enters “Rückwärts”, while Johan Van Roy of Suicide Commando appears on “Virtual Goddess”. Why did the more personal album become the right place for other voices again, and how much of their own identity do you want a guest to bring into a Mildreda song?

Jan: That’s true: on “Blue-Devilled” I deliberately avoided collaborations for exactly the reason you mention. But that was an artistic decision rather than something dictated by the subject matter. I needed to prove to myself that I could carry an entire Mildreda album on my own. Once I had done that, there was no reason to keep that door closed. This time I wanted other voices on the record, and I’m incredibly happy with the people I managed to bring in.

The collaboration with Calva Y Nada was actually a blessing on a very practical level as well. “Rückwärts” was one of the first songs I wrote for the album, but after living with the demo for a while, I realised I was completely stuck. I loved the track, but I simply couldn’t imagine my own voice doing it justice. Constantin has such a unique and unmistakable voice that once I started fantasising about someone else singing it, I simply couldn’t hear anyone but him. Through mutual friends we got in touch, eventually met in person, and to my delight he connected with the idea. For me, it was a genuine full-circle moment. Calva Y Nada was one of the bands that defined my teenage years, so hearing Constantin’s voice on a Mildreda record still feels both surreal and deeply meaningful.

Johan Van Roy represents something very similar to me. Together with Dirk Ivens, he helped shape what dark electro sounded like in Belgium. With “Realities”, I deliberately wanted to reconnect with that cold, uncompromising Belgian industrial DNA, and “Virtual Goddess” immediately felt like the perfect track for Johan. He brought exactly the intensity and attitude I had hoped for. And I think that also answers the question of how much of themselves I want guests to bring. I don’t invite someone simply to perform a part that could just as easily have been sung by me. I want their identity to become part of the song. Constantin and Johan are unmistakably themselves on these tracks, while somehow still sounding completely at home within Mildreda.

Having them both on “Realities” is a real privilege. They are far more than guest vocalists to me: they are two artists whose music helped shape my own musical identity long before Mildreda even existed.

Karo: The remixes take that question of identity even further. Das Ich and Steril reconstruct “End of the Line”, while Flesh Field rework “Virtual Goddess”, and around a record called “Realities” the very act of remixing becomes conceptually appropriate: the same composition receives another body, another emphasis and another emotional temperature while remaining recognisable. Did any of those versions make you discover something in your own original that you had not consciously put there? More fundamentally, where does the identity of a song reside if rhythm, texture, atmosphere and structure can change so dramatically while we still perceive it as the same work?

Jan: I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with remixes. I love them when they have a genuine reason to exist, rather than simply being part of some endless process of squeezing more material out of a release. The occasion has to feel right, and so does the remixer. That’s why I’m quite selective about both. Mildreda hasn’t actually been through the remix machine that often, so having several artists reinterpret these songs was relatively new territory for Mildreda, and quite exciting.

Das Ich were genuine heroes of my youth. Their first two albums still give me goosebumps today, and remarkably, they haven’t aged at all. They were simply light-years ahead of their time. Having Bruno remix one of my songs was therefore a childhood dream coming true. And when I first heard the result, I actually did a little dance of joy. It sounds unmistakably like Das Ich, yet “End of the Line” is still clearly there. In a strange way, it feels like a true hybrid: half my song, half a Das Ich composition. Perhaps that is also an answer to your question about where the identity of a song resides. Apparently you can change an enormous amount and still preserve some kind of core that remains recognisable.

I’m equally happy with the other remixes. Steril are heroes of mine as well, and they transformed “End of the Line” into a wonderfully tight club track. Flesh Field, on the other hand, happened to cross my path at exactly the right moment, so involving him was almost an act of serendipity. I loved hearing “Virtual Goddess” thrown into his wonderfully mad industrial mixture of bombast, aggression and even a touch of dubstep. What fascinates me about all three is that I can still recognise my songs, but I’m hearing them through someone else’s ears. Maybe that’s what a good remix should do: not simply decorate the original, but reveal another possible reality that was somehow already hiding inside it. The Das Ich and Steril versions of “End of the Line” were released on the June 2026 EP, while the “Virtual Goddess” release includes the Flesh Field remix.

Karo: “Virtual Goddess” avoids one of the easiest traps in writing about digital culture because the narrator is implicated in the mechanism he criticises. There is a virtual goddess, but there is also a virtual god; desire becomes entangled with images, attention, views and projection, so nobody gets to occupy the comfortable position outside the system. Is complicity important here? Have we reached a point where criticising mediated reality while continuing to produce, consume and emotionally invest in it is itself one of the defining contradictions of contemporary life?

Jan: This is a difficult question because there are several things tangled up in it. There is the sheer amount of our day that social media consumes, but also the way it affects how we present ourselves and how we perceive other people. Both images are inevitably distorted. At the same time, however critical I am of social media, I can’t dismiss it as purely negative. It remains, whether we like it or not, an important way of discovering music and news, staying connected and sharing your own story with the world. And occasionally you even find a good joke there. So yes, complicity is absolutely part of it. I notice the contradiction in myself all the time. I can hardly keep away from my smartphone, call it an addiction if you like, while simultaneously being deeply irritated by the whole mechanism. I’m frustrated by all those pixel-perfect façades, yet at the same time I participate in creating one myself. I criticise the game while continuing to play it. And artificial intelligence is adding yet another layer of complexity to all of this. The boundaries between what is real, constructed, enhanced or entirely artificial are becoming increasingly difficult to define. We seem to be living inside a fascinating and slightly disturbing science-fiction film, except that none of us gets to sit outside it and simply watch.

Karo: “Götterfall” almost feels like an older Mildreda argument surviving inside an entirely different philosophical environment. We have discussed your atheism before, and the quasi-sacral architecture of “Blue-Devilled” has largely vanished, yet somebody is still firing at gods who remain silent, mocking and apparently impossible to kill. If those gods are no longer theological, what has taken their place? Are there ideas, institutions, authorities, memories or even people we consciously stop believing in while continuing to grant them enormous psychological power?

Jan: The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Getae would shoot arrows into the sky during thunderstorms, threatening their god. I’ve always found that an incredibly powerful image, and I had actually used it before in a Your Life On Hold song. But it was simply too strong not to bring into the Mildreda universe as well: man, confronted with a reality he cannot accept, firing his arrows at the heavens. I also knew I wanted a song in German on the album, which allowed me to reshape the idea into something new. The arrows became bullets, and German inevitably gives the whole thing a very different weight and character. But the central idea remained the same: we are powerless and insignificant, raging against forces that are infinitely larger than ourselves.

Karo: “Reality” widens the scope dramatically at the end: headlines, war, mediated violence, environmental destruction, the repeated consumption of catastrophe through screens. Much of the album has dealt with extremely intimate realities such as desire, damage, loneliness, ageing and unrealised possibilities, and then the individual is placed inside this enormous informational environment. Is the movement outward suggesting that there is ultimately no purely private reality, because even our most intimate emotional lives are continuously penetrated and reorganised by images, narratives and catastrophes arriving from outside?

Jan: Despite what the title might suggest, this closing track is something of an outsider on the album in terms of content indeed. Where the rest of the album navigates my inner landscape, this song shifts its gaze to the world around me, our planet, and it isn’t doing well. Long-time fans who were with us back in the cassette days may recognise this piece. I wrote the first demo thirty years ago. I had always intended to give it a definitive version someday, and this album finally made that possible: new lyrics, new sound and a long-awaited rebirth.

Karo: Finally, you already have concerts around the new-album period, including NCN in Deutzen on September 6 and Fourscher Festival in Erfurt in November. What happens after those dates? Are further Mildreda concerts already being discussed, and is the ambition eventually to take “Realities” on a more extensive tour of its own?

Jan: I definitely hope to play a lot of shows with Mildreda in 2027. A few things have already been confirmed, but there’s still a lot up in the air. If the stars align, it could turn into quite an adventurous year!

About Mildreda

Mildreda is the Belgian dark-electro project led by producer, vocalist and songwriter Jan Dewulf. Its roots go back to the mid-1990s, when Dewulf, still in his teens and strongly affected by the cold Belgian electronics of acts such as The Klinik, began working with synthesizers and home-recording equipment. His self-released cassette “II Castrato” appeared in 1995, followed by “De Laffe Denker” in 1996. The latter circulated widely through the electro underground, and Mildreda subsequently shared stages with acts including Plastic Noise Experience, Terminal Choice, Covenant and VNV Nation.

Dewulf later put Mildreda on hold and concentrated on Diskonnekted, while also completing a degree in philosophy. He returned to Mildreda with the digitally released “Coward Philosophy” in 2016. After signing with Dependent Records, the project released “I Was Never Really There” in 2021, bringing the early Belgian dark-electro foundations into a substantially more detailed contemporary production environment. Guests on that record included Dirk Ivens, Cyan of The Eternal Afflict and Numb’s Don Gordon, while Claus Larsen of Leaether Strip handled mastering.

The concept album “Blue-Devilled” followed in December 2023. Built partly around Jean-Paul Sartre’s treatment of hell and the judgement of others, it expanded Mildreda’s melodic and atmospheric vocabulary while retaining its Belgian and Canadian dark-electro foundations.

“Realities”, released on August 28, 2026 through Dependent, contains 18 tracks across two discs and is available as a limited 48-page hardcover artbook designed by Henk Willems. The album features Constantin “Breñal” Warter of Calva Y Nada on “Rückwärts” and Johan Van Roy of Suicide Commando on “Virtual Goddess”. Its conceptual grounding shifts from Sartre towards Camus, while recurring “Reality Checks” connect the individual compositions into one continuous album structure. Mildreda’s official biography describes the project as led by Dewulf; the live incarnation consists of Jan Dewulf and Christophe “Salva” Salvatore. The single “Silk Skin” preceded the album in August 2026.

Interview by Karo Kratochwil.