CURSE MACKEY
w/ SINE, Void Palace
8/10/25 – Mercury Lounge – NYC
©Alice Teeple
On a hot August New York night, the Mercury Lounge in the Lower East Side felt like a secret chapel for those who’d come to worship at The Red Party’s “Special Sunday Service.” The pews were absent, but the congregation, black-clad and buzzing, was ready.
Void Palace opened with synths like storm clouds breaking over an empty highway, drawing the first sway from the crowd. They put on a high-octane performance, bringing to mind a hybrid of TR/ST and Front Line Assembly – a huge, bombastic sound blasting from just two performers.
SINE followed: sharp, cinematic, each beat slicing clean through the low hum of anticipation. Mastermind Rona Rougeheart emerged in an expressionless mask, an imposing silhouette flipping a neon cross with solemn drama before diving into her set. She shed the mask soon after, performing the rest beneath surrealist bursts of light and shifting background projections.
The room was already leaning toward the moment everyone knew was coming: and then Curse Mackey, currently on the Electric Exorcism tour, rose from the fog. One second, he was a silhouette fiddling with the knobs of his sitcker-clad synthesizer; the next, a figure in motion, springing into the air like the music had unshackled gravity itself. His voice carried the grain of experience – rich, immediate, alive – and each phrase was thrown like a lifeline into the sea of faces. Mackey prowled, prowled again, then leapt forward, arms out as if to gather the room into his orbit.
The energy surged, broke, then rebuilt in fresh waves. He moved as though tethered to every bass note, every flash of light. The fog curled around his boots, refracting the stage glow into something cinematic. In the crush of the chorus, you could see strangers locking eyes, grinning in shared disbelief.
Between songs, Mackey spoke little except for a few jokes, but his expression…half joy, half mischief…said more than a set list ever could. By the time the final hit dissolved into applause, the room wasn’t ready to let go.
Some shows are just music, but this felt like a communion. And as the house lights rose, you could sense it – the crowd had given as much as they’d taken, and in return, Mackey had left a piece of his soul somewhere in the fog.
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