Covert One

There’s a panic behind the eyes of this track a cold, metallic dread that breathes down your neck from the first second. Covert One doesn’t ask for your attention, it hacks its way in like a backdoor virus, leaving you locked in a strobe-lit room with nothing but fragments of trust and the sound of your own heart clawing at your ribs.

Arkansas quartet LEVELS have never really played by the book, but this time? They’ve ripped it apart, set it on fire, and scattered the ashes across a glitch-ridden battlefield. Covert One is the sound of being seduced by something that promises safety, only to trap you inside it. It’s abusive love dressed in chrome industrial, electronic, weaponised.

The guitars are barely human anymore processed, distorted, twitching like a static signal from a lost satellite. The drums hit like surveillance footage: looped, relentless, like you’re being watched but can’t look back. Every section of this track feels like a new chamber of trauma. The clean vocals don’t offer relief they drip with desperation, with that too late realisation that the love you thought would save you was actually rewiring your entire sense of self. And when the breakdown lands? It’s less of a mosh call and more of a psychological exorcism.

Lyrically, it’s poetic in the most poisoned way possible. Not dramatic for drama’s sake but intentionally suffocating. You’re dropped into a spiral of manipulation and self erasure. There’s no clear antagonist. It’s internal, external, intimate, and overwhelming. There’s a line between romance and warfare, and LEVELS don’t just walk it they weaponise it.

What’s most impressive is how this thing moves. It’s dynamic, but never chaotic. There’s control in the chaos a calculated pacing that lets tension simmer before ripping the floor out beneath you. And the layering? Unreal. It sounds like you’re hearing it through a cracked security feed everything slightly corrupted, slightly too close, too personal. It’s Nine Inch Nails meets Loathe via a fever dream you can’t wake up from.

This isn’t a track for casual listeners. It demands you sit in the discomfort, feel the dread in every line, every glitch, every choked breath. It’s vulnerable in a way that makes you feel like you’re reading someone’s secret journal after the apocalypse. And still it bangs. There’s rhythm, structure, hooks even but all wrapped in barbed wire.

LEVELS aren’t just making music anymore. They’re making statements. Covert One is cinematic, visceral, and unapologetically confrontational. It’s a song that stares you down, drags you into its trauma loop, and dares you to come out the other side changed.

And truthfully? You will be.