Some bands make music you can throw on while you do the dishes. Leather Laces do not. You can’t fold laundry to Marching in the Fog without feeling like the socks are staging an uprising. Their third single is not background noise. It’s foreground warfare. Marching in the Fog doesn’t politely request space; it takes it by force. By the time you realize what’s happening, the march has already begun, and you’re either moving with it or being dragged along.
The song doesn’t care if you’re multitasking, it doesn’t care if you’re “just in the mood for something chill.” It’s hostile to chill. It demands presence, like a drill sergeant screaming in your face but with guitars grinding against metal and synths stabbing through the fog. Where other artists might angle for playlist-friendliness, Leather Laces aim for total incursion. Marching in the Fog isn’t here to score your errands; it’s here to turn them into combat scenarios.
The track doesn’t start so much as it advances. Slow, deliberate, heavy. The tempo doesn’t sprint, doesn’t swagger; it marches, ritualistically, like a column of boots grinding into wet pavement. Guitars are less “played” than “weaponized,” snarling through static, while metallic synths stab through the mix like searchlights sweeping for intruders. And then there’s the percussion: not a beat, but artillery fire, dragging the whole piece forward with grim inevitability. You don’t “get into” Marching in the Fog. You submit.
The clever bit here is restraint. Leather Laces don’t just hammer you for four minutes straight. Rather, they know how to let the smoke linger. Sections dissolve into digital haze, almost ambient, like you’ve slipped into the fog of war itself. But before you can get too comfortable, the march snaps back in, dragging you by the collar into the theater of action. That tension between atmosphere and assault, suspension and detonation, is what makes the track so gripping.
Stylistically, it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of cyberpunk synthwave, industrial grit, and heavy electronic textures. Imagine a soundtrack for a stealth mission in a neon-drenched dystopia; some lone figure slipping through alleyways, hacking terminals, dodging drones. It’s cinematic, but not in a Marvel-score way; more like the kind of low-budget cyberpunk film where you can smell the fog machine.
But here’s the thing: calling Marching in the Fog “cinematic” undersells it. “Cinematic” is what you call the royalty-free strings on a YouTube trailer for an app no one will ever download. Cinematic music can fade into the background, politely setting a mood while you scroll your phone. Leather Laces aren’t just setting the mood on Marching in the Fog; they’re staging a siege.
By the end, Leather Laces don’t just sound like a band; they sound like architects. They’re not writing songs, they’re building environments; dense, suffocating, and impossible to ignore. Marching in the Fog is music for infiltration, for resistance, for that moment when the smoke clears and you realize you’ve already been surrounded.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
