Disaster on Neptune is what happens when someone locks themselves in a room with a synthesizer, a few unresolved emotions, and absolutely no intention of making “party music.” This is Mang’s solo debut, and it’s not here to hold your hand. Rather, it’s here to hold a mirror up to your face, dim the lights, play a synth chord in a minor key, and whisper: “So… feeling anything yet?”
This isn’t your typical electronic album. There are no festival drops. No sleek, overproduced serotonin loops begging to be put in a Nike ad. What you get instead is fifteen tracks of slow, haunted self-discovery. This thing sounds like it was written entirely at night, probably while staring at a blank Google Doc and wondering where exactly it all went wrong. It’s glitchy, it’s intimate, and it’s got the emotional clarity of someone who’s been awake for 72 hours but suddenly understands everything.
And yes, technically it’s electronic music. There are synths. There are drum machines. There are effects that make the vocals sound like they’ve been filtered through regret, anxiety, and maybe a cracked iPhone mic. But that’s all just the medium. The message is far messier: identity, detachment, vulnerability, self-destruction, self-repair. Imagine an ambient therapy session where the therapist is just a loop pedal and the only prescription is time.
The bulk of the album is self-produced, and you’ll hear it. It’s sparse, raw, and feels like it was made not for anyone but rather in spite of everything. It’s the kind of sound design that feels too intimate, like reading someone’s unfinished diary while they sleep in the next room. Minimalist, yes, but in the way a decaying building is minimalist: empty, haunted, and somehow still beautiful.
Three standout tracks on Disaster on Neptune feature outside collaborators, each adding their own specific flavor of beautiful disorientation. “Listen” (produced by Durty Dill) kicks things off like an emotional fire alarm; glitchy, metallic, and absolutely not here to ease you in. “Foreign Friend” (produced by William Binderup) slows the tempo and cranks the existential dread, sounding like a voicemail from another dimension; distorted, distant, and maybe a little too honest. And then there’s “Dead Prez” (produced by YTC and co-produced by mang), which ditches subtlety entirely in favor of industrial chaos. It’s the album’s purest scream; jagged, relentless, and exactly the kind of track you throw on when the revolution starts inside your own head.
The rest of the album is all Mang, alone and unfiltered, weaving coldwave, downtempo, and ambient unease into an emotional collapse that somehow still grooves. It’s music for 3AM pacing, for unresolved thoughts, for people who’ve ever cried while adjusting synth levels. Every track spirals inward, and if you let it, so will you.
And then there’s the short film, also called Disaster on Neptune. Now, this isn’t a multimedia project in the gimmicky, “scan the QR code for exclusive lore” sense. It’s more like a companion mirror, with the film as the external metaphor, the album as the internal monologue. One gives you the visual of the crash; the other puts you inside the astronaut’s helmet during the descent.
Mang describes the album as “an exploration of my shadow self,” which is probably the most honest album description anyone’s given since Trent Reznor looked at a keyboard and said “I’m gonna hurt some feelings today.” Each track bleeds into the next, like journal entries smudged by tears and whatever existential grime builds up on a MIDI controller after a long night of emotional labor.
Importantly, Disaster on Neptune doesn’t resolve. There’s no grand payoff, no last track that ties it all up with a neat, glowing bow. Instead, the ending sort of evaporates, like smoke you didn’t realize was in the room. It doesn’t tell you what to feel. It just makes sure you’re feeling something, and then leaves you alone with the consequences.
This album isn’t here to entertain you. It’s here to sit next to you while you try to decide whether to text someone you shouldn’t, or delete all your social media and move to the woods. It’s not a playlist banger. It’s not “good vibes only.” It’s “maybe I’m not okay, but that’s fine because this song understands me better than my friends do.”
So, yeah. If you want crisp hooks and clean choruses, you should look literally anywhere else. But if you want an album that feels like it understands your nightmares, this album is for you. Disaster on Neptune by Mang is not just a debut; it’s an unfiltered signal broadcast directly from someone’s inner collapse.
And if that’s not your thing… Congratulations on your emotional stability. Truly. We’re all very happy for you.
Follow Mang
Published in partnership with SubmitHub
About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
