New Music Review: SINA MATIX ‘Cursed – EP’

Rating: 7.5 / 10 Stars

SINA MATIX is: Sina Matix (all music, programming, and production)

REVIEW – Isolation, identity loss, emotional collapse—SINA MATIX doesn’t just flirt with darkness, they document its descent. On the debut EP Cursed, the Jacksonville-based dark electro artist unpacks despair with unnerving vulnerability, fusing textured atmospheres and cinematic samples into a sound that feels less like music and more like trauma made audible.

At just over 22 minutes, Cursed is a conceptual journey that plays like a digital elegy for a life uprooted. Inspired by the real-world experience of being severed from familiarity—a move away from one’s home state, the collapse of a 40-year career, divorce, and the painful loss of child custody—the EP becomes a vessel for emotional exorcism. What emerges is a genre the artist calls “Dark Dramatic Electro,” a label that barely captures the depth of the sonic storytelling here.

“Where Did It Go Wrong” opens the collection with a chilling question. Through ambient washes, glitchy pulses, and whispered self-interrogation, the track paints a portrait of a life unraveling thread by thread. It doesn’t reach for answers—it just dwells in the ache of having none. Next, “Motherfucker” offers a jarring tonal pivot: a bitter, minimalist confrontation that pulses with fury beneath restraint. It’s the shortest track on the EP, but it leaves a scar.

“Worthless (Remastered)” may be the emotional centerpiece. With icy synths and emotionally hollowed-out vocal treatments, it captures the numbness of being unseen—of yelling into a void and only hearing your own echo. “Religion Blood and Sacrifice” follows like a fever dream filtered through static—sacrilegious, cinematic, and seething with existential weight. You feel it more than you hear it.

The title track “Cursed” drills down into the central theme, a claustrophobic expression of misfortune and spiritual suffocation. It’s less a song than a state of mind—one where every window is blacked out and even hope feels hostile. Finally, “The Show is Over” ends the EP with haunting finality, like the credits rolling after a personal apocalypse. There’s no grand resolution—just an understanding that some stories end mid-sentence.

Behind this bleakness lies intent. SINA MATIX doesn’t create to wallow—they create to expose. Their use of samples from dark cinema and television adds emotional anchors to the surreal, creating a world that’s hyperreal yet grounded in deeply human pain. Their background in visual music enhances the cinematic scope of every track, making Cursed feel like a film score for a life that’s come undone.

Hailing originally from Houston, TX, now based in Jacksonville, FL, SINA MATIX cites a wild spectrum of influences: Assemblage 23, David Lynch, Tim Burton, Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, VNV Nation, and even Tchaikovsky and Glenn Miller. That eclecticism pulses through every note, lending Cursed a sophistication that lifts it beyond pure despair into something bordering on art installation. This is more than synths and shadows. This is a reckoning.

With Cursed, SINA MATIX offers a debut that doesn’t just reflect the darkness—it dares to sit with it, to shape it, and to give it a sound.