EDEN Channels Haunting Longing in “Ghost in the Shell”
It’s been barely a minute since “gggiiiiirrrrlllll” drifted into the scene with its warped vowels and weathered emotions, but EDEN—ever the architect of liminal music—is back with “Ghost in the Shell,” a track that further blurs the line between memory and digital decay.
“Ghost in the Shell” doesn’t so much build a world as it dissolves one, pixel by pixel, in some vapor-lit corner of your subconscious. It’s not an easy listen, nor a hard one; more like stumbling across an old voicemail you left yourself in a dream you forgot you had.
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You’ll find it living somewhere between synths that ache and beats that stutter like a nervous thought. Not quite pop, not quite ghost; this is music that drifts past genre like a memory slipping past your grip. It’s part gentle static, part emotional calculus, and wholly EDEN.
According to Jonathon Ng (aka EDEN), the track was born on his tour bus in 2023, during a moment of overwhelming longing for something that could never happen. The song spirals through emotional proxies, static-heavy echoes, and the kind of longing that’s easier to code than confess.
“I remember having this crushing feeling of wanting something so badly that could never happen. I was overwhelmed. We all love things that can’t/don’t love us back,” Jonathon explains.
“Ghost in the Shell” offers a glimpse into “Dark,” the upcoming album slated for release later this year, a project shaped by ever-shifting inspiration and emotional intensity. Based on this track alone, “Dark” seems destined to be the kind of work that folds in on itself, like origami made from old hard drives and diary scraps: immersive, abstract, and quietly unsettling.
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Then there are the visuals… The accompanying music video—helmed by Zhang + Knight, who seem to direct with a scalpel dipped in oil paint, which is then shot in pre-4k digital video glory—is a mood spiral carved out of loss, nostalgia, and that weird feeling you get when the sun hits the Danube just right. Originally imagined on a hazy Mediterranean escape, the story was rerouted to Budapest, a shift that lent it a kind of haunted elegance. It’s not about memory, exactly. It is one.
The duo built the visual narrative off a single line from EDEN: “Loving something that can never love you back.” From there, the video poses a haunting question: What can’t love you back? Perhaps it’s time itself, a once-tender force turned distant relic, now reduced to playing reruns in the theater of your dreams.
From the self-released EPs “End Credits” and “i think you think too much of me,” which garnered nearly a billion streams, to genre-defying albums like “vertigo,” “no future,” and “ICYMI,” Jonathon Ng has steadily built an emotionally resonant, genre-fluid universe that now culminates in Dark.
EDEN started out whispering into headphones and has gradually evolved into someone who wires emotion to electricity without short-circuiting either. “Ghost in the Shell” proves he’s still more focused on crafting immersive emotional worlds than fitting into any genre box.
A behind-the-scenes feature is also expected, offering a deeper look into the emotional and visual process that brought “Ghost in the Shell” to life on the streets of Budapest.
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