This Lonesome Paradise Unveils Death Motels: A Gothic Desert Odyssey of music and cinema
“I make music from the visuals in my head, they’re the soundtracks to movies that only exist in my mind,” says songwriter E Ray Béchard of This Lonesome Paradise. Now with their latest release Death Motels, those movies take form, sprawling across a three-part cinematic series that drags audiences into the gothic underbelly of the desert.
The cinematic series trilogy — E01: ‘Let Us Prey’, E02: ‘Changelings’, and E03: ‘Shadow of the Blue Moon’ is a fever-dream narrative, playing like a séance committed to tape. As if the viewer were commanding a Ouija board, each chapter grows darker, pulling us deeper into a ritual that ends in sacrifice. By day, marauding motorcycle gangs stalk the desert highways, leaving dust and dread in their wake. By night, they shed their leather and chrome, transforming into cult figures under the glow of the moon. The protagonist, a vessel for the symbol of the outcast, the freak at the edge of society, leads us into this liminal world.
“I didn’t want a clean narrative,” Béchard explains. “I wanted the audience to have more questions than answers after watching it.” The films drip with surreal menace: green-glowing ultraviolet drinks, spiked with drops of scorpion, echo the corrupted milk of A Clockwork Orange. Spectral rituals unfold in landscapes reminiscent of The Hills Have Eyes colliding with Jodorowsky’s El Topo. Their cinematic palette of saturated reds, deep blacks, and spectral neon echoes the fever-dream intensity of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy — a world drenched in hallucinatory colour where dread and transcendence are inseparable. Here, violence and ecstasy share the same frame, and the desert itself becomes both executioner and oracle.
In our premiere ‘Changelings’, the world erupts into menace. Marauding motorcycle gangs prowl the desert highways by day; by night, they dissolve into ritual, their leather and chrome replaced by masks and firelight. Faces shift, allegiances fracture, and the protagonist is pulled deeper into the mystery of their own past.
Musically, Death Motels is relentless. Ferocious guitars slash through the silence like blades, low-end bass churns like a storm beneath the earth, and Béchard’s voice hovers somewhere between incantation and confession. Jordin Bordeaux’s spectral voice and Mellotron textures conjure an atmosphere that feels both sacred and menacing, layering a haunted beauty over the storm. The songs don’t simply play, they summon.
With this release, the band departs from their earlier folkier and bluesier origins. Much like the films that accompany it, the music plunges darker and further down the rabbit hole, a place where nightmare and revelation blur, where every sound feels like it’s been unearthed from the desert itself.
Founded in the mists of the Pacific Northwest and later rooted in the high deserts of the American Southwest, This Lonesome Paradise is a collision of gothic folk, psych-rock, and industrial static. Their music evokes the cinematic sprawl of Ennio Morricone colliding with the raw edge of Wovenhand, Nick Cave, and The Black Angels. Known for blending sound and vision into one seamless experience, the band crafts records that feel like landscapes, or soundtracks to some strange horror flick. With Death Motels, they step further into the shadows, leaving behind their blusier/folkier origins for something darker, heavier, and more immersive.
Death Motels is released March 12 2026 via Bad Vibes Good Friends and can be pre-ordered here on Bandcamp.
This Lonesome Paradise:
- E Ray Béchard — Vocals, Guitar
- Jordin Bordeaux — Vocals, Mellotron
- Christopher Wilson — Bass
- M. Ivan Garcia — Drums
