The ghosts of unsolved crimes linger not in dusty archives but in the digital ether, their stories endlessly retold in podcasts and docuseries that have become a defining cultural obsession of the modern era. We consume these tragedies as narratives, case files parsed for clues and morbid curiosities. But what of the silence at the center of each story? Into this space of unresolved history steps Lovelorn Dolls, the Brussels-based gothic rock outfit who, with their new EP, ‘True Crimes,’ seek not to solve these cases, but to inhabit their sorrow.

Announced for release on October 3, 2025, via the Alfa Matrix Records sublabel Spleen+, the four-song collection is a deliberate and ambitious act of musical statement, one that reframes infamous cold cases as haunted elegies and gives a spectral voice to the voiceless.

This release finds Lovelorn Dolls at a pivotal moment. Following a five-year hiatus, the band returned with their 2024 album ‘Deadtime Stories,’ a release widely seen as a creative “resurrection” that reasserted their potent blend of heavy guitars and cinematic synth textures.

‘True Crimes’ builds on that momentum, but it also marks a fundamental shift in the band’s very structure. For the first time, the founding duo of vocalist and lyricist Kristell Lowagie and multi-instrumentalist Bernard Daubresse are officially joined by sound engineer and live guitarist Eric Renwart, cementing their evolution into a trio.

This expansion is not merely logistical; it is audible. The sound promised on ‘True Crimes’ is denser, sharper, and more layered, a sonic maturation that provides the necessary gravity for a project of such thematic weight.

A Decade in the Dollhouse

‘True Crimes’ is rooted in the band’s decade-long journey through the shadows. Formed in 2010, Lowagie and Daubresse quickly established a distinct aesthetic they termed “creepy cute,” a world where the whimsical gloom of Tim Burton’s visuals met the musical DNA of acts like The Birthday Massacre and Lacuna Coil.

Their 2013 debut album, ‘The House of Wonders,’ produced by Victor Love of Dope Stars Inc., was a confident mission statement, blending gothic metal heft with Lowagie’s chameleonic vocals, which could shift from the ethereal fragility of Anneke van Giersbergen to the commanding presence of Cristina Scabbia.

A deliberate pivot followed with 2014’s ‘Japanese Robot Invasion,’ an album that traded metallic crunch for colder, more prominent synthesizers, demonstrating an early willingness to evolve beyond genre confines. After a brief hiatus that saw Lowagie explore purely electronic textures with her solo project SIN.SIN, a band returned with their most personal and harrowing work to date, 2018’s ‘Darker Ages.’

Daubresse has described the album’s creation as a “catharsis” following a period of health struggles, while Lowagie has cited the terror attacks in Europe as a direct inspiration, a loss of innocence that bled into the music.

This history reveals a band unafraid to channel darkness, both internal and external. ‘True Crimes’ is not a sudden turn toward the macabre, but the culmination of a career spent exploring the tension between innocence and horror, playful darkness and ritual gravity.

The Haunting of ‘True Crimes’

The EP’s conceptual rigor is immediately apparent in its lead single and accompanying video, ‘The Boy in the Box.’ The track addresses the heartbreaking case of Joseph Augustus Zarelli, an unidentified child found deceased in Philadelphia in 1957. The song is not a driving rock anthem but a mournful piece built on sparse instrumentation and spectral harmonies, what one might call a lullaby turned dirge.

It feels fragile, like a ghost child’s cradle song, prioritizing atmosphere over aggression. The video deepens this narrative of investigation as remembrance. Instead of sensationalism, it layers images of detective boards and crime scene markers with a chilling, final skeletal reveal. It is a work of profound empathy, establishing the EP’s intent to act as an examiner of evidence, not an exploiter of tragedy.

This meticulous, thematic approach extends across the entire release. Each of the four tracks is a carefully constructed sonic memorial to a specific, notorious case. The opening song, ‘Dahlia Bleeds,’ confronts the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia. The composition is described as a dirge of distortion and spectral melody, but its most insightful feature is the use of intertwined male and female vocals.

This choice musically embodies the conflicting public narratives that have defined Short’s legacy—the innocent dreamer versus the femme fatale—and in doing so, comments on the brutal mythologizing of a victim whose own voice was stolen.

‘Call Me Your Ghost’ invokes the cryptic terror of the Zodiac Killer, who haunted Northern California in the late 1960s. The music mirrors the killer’s methods, with ghostly, harpsichord-like synthesizers twisting into sharp, violent guitar lines, conjuring a sense of ritualistic menace.

The refrain, a repeated, ciphered chant of the title, transforms the killer’s taunts into an echo of anonymous dread, a sonic cryptogram that resonates with public obsession and unsolved fear. The EP concludes with ‘Velvet Little Voice,’ a track that channels the tragic case of JonBenét Ramsey. Here, warbling synths and spectral vocal effects are used to mirror the disorienting media circus that surrounded the six-year-old’s death in 1996.

Lowagie’s soaring delivery gives voice to the silenced child, while a male vocal undercurrent cuts through like an interrogation, creating a palpable tension between innocence and accusation. The atmosphere is one of both séance and elegy, capturing not only the sorrow of a life lost but the exploitation that followed.

A Disappointing and Artificial Witness

While the EP’s music succeeds in its empathetic mission, its cover art represents a jarring and deeply unfortunate creative misstep. The image—a doll-like girl, seemingly the band’s own interpretation of Wednesday Addams from the back, staring at a crime board—is rendered with the synthetic, soulless sheen of AI generation, a fact underscored by vocalist Kristell Lowagie’s recent admission to using AI to “enhance” her visual work.

For a project dedicated to honoring the human victims of tragedy, the choice is nothing short of disgraceful. The algorithmic coldness of the art stands in stark opposition to the subject matter, reducing a potent concept to a generic, non-creative digital illustration that lacks any genuine emotional weight.

This failure is thrown into sharp relief when compared to the band’s past visual triumphs. The cover for 2018’s ‘Darker Ages’ was a stunning piece of photographic art and a masterclass in gothic aesthetic. It was profoundly human, capturing a moment of somber, tangible grief that perfectly mirrored the album’s cathartic exploration of personal and societal trauma. That artwork possessed a soul; it was a piece of human expression that invited contemplation.

The cover for ‘True Crimes,’ by contrast, feels plain and emotionally vacant, a lamentable choice that creates an unbridgeable gap between the project’s profound musical empathy and its hollow, machine-made visual representation. From a collector’s perspective, the generic nature of the new cover, with look-alike images all over the internet, makes it a non-essential item, whereas the ‘Darker Ages’ art is a memorable and must-have piece.

From a writer’s perspective, the EP cover “art” is a painful sore to the eye. It creates a sense of reluctance when it comes to promoting this new release, something that should be avoided in the future. Even when the music is strong, this kind of artwork makes one want to skip to the following release on the editorial schedule and simply forget they ever saw it.

The Detective and the Medium

The project elevates their long-standing “creepy cute” aesthetic from a stylistic choice into a powerful thematic tool. The act of filtering these horrific events through a lens of childlike innocence—a doll-like persona, the focus on child victims—creates a profound cognitive dissonance.

The listener is forced to confront the brutality not as a detached consumer of media, but from a perspective that cannot possibly comprehend it, thereby amplifying the tragedy. It is a sophisticated artistic choice that places them firmly in the lineage of gothic art, which has always used melancholy and a fascination with mortality to explore the deepest facets of the human condition.

With ‘True Crimes,’ Lovelorn Dolls have crafted their most focused, potent, and culturally relevant work to date. It is an act of artistic reclamation, one that pulls four infamous stories from the cold grip of folklore and returns them to the realm of human tragedy. This is not a soundtrack to the shadows, but a solemn light cast within them, a reminder that behind every headline and case file is a silence that music, in its unique and haunting way, can sometimes help us to understand.

How does music’s abstract and emotional nature change our perception of true crime stories, compared to the factual, narrative-driven approach of podcasts and documentaries?