Comprised of partners Renee Barrance (Élan Vital) and Tim Player (Opposite Sex), OV PAIN have been working out of Dunedin for the past 12 months and are currently touring in Germany. As well as consistent live gigging on public bar and festival stages the band put together their 8-song début self-titled album late 2016. It's a gem that lays waste to that imbecilic notion that new possibilities within rock and roll are destined to be staid bloated rituals engineered in pursuit of a cheap buck or a quick fuck. Recorded at the Anteroom in Port Chalmers (something of a spiritual home for the band) and mixed and mastered by local legend Forbes Williams, OV PAIN is infused with that sense of southern gothic and poetic dissonance some of us love to love. On record one hears their music (plenty of catchy pop shrouded in twilight's shade2) emanating from a heart and soul located simultaneously near and far away. Similarly, the vernacular style of OV PAIN's song writing is richly haunting for being familiar yet obliquely and properly weird. On stage they flit between minimal intimacy and thumping sonic cave-rock. How such seemingly contradictory charms play out is part of the tension inherent to this duo's character. Currently a Dunedin favourite, Ov Pain are pegged locally as dark but highly energetic, post-synth-punk, with some goth/shoegaze elements. They're generally given an A++. Ronnie has them down as post-gaze-shoe-wave, while the Bandcamp page has them parked simply under devotional coldwave Dunedin.