New Music: Christian Cohle – Venus

Sometimes, we can’t escape our fate, or our present. And I wonder how great a role to play on Venus, from Christian Cohle’s Queen of Ashes album.

Fate played a large role in Roman religion, and Venus was their goddess of beauty, desire, and love, much like the Greeks’ Aphrodite. Deities of that time were capricious and sometimes cruel, and people might not want to attract their attention and avoid the role set out for them.

Cohle’s repetition of the phrase “I’ll keep on running” doesn’t fully reveal whether he is running to or from love and fate, and rather like Sisyphus, it becomes apparent that the repetition lies as much in the task of living and loving as it does in anchoring the lyrics.

Also, I wonder if Christian Cohle is embracing his own fate here: his voice, smoky and romantic with an undercurrent of sadness, puts him alongside artists like Bryan Ferry, Scott Walker, and David Sylvian. And you can pick up their influence in the post-genre tones of the arrangement, very much its own sound with its own soul, with a dose of post-punk too for good measure.

“I was drawn to Venus as both divine and predatory… beautiful and magnetic, yet quietly dangerous,” states Cohle. “I was drawn to the image of Venus as the mythological embodiment of love and attraction, but I wasn’t interested in portraying her as a perfect goddess, but rather a force of nature, both divine and predatory. In the song, she gradually takes on spider-like qualities. Like spiders, she relies on attraction rather than pursuit. She is beautiful and magnetic, yet quietly dangerous.”

Queen of Ashes is set for release on the 16th of October. Christian Cohle will host a launch party for the album at Whelan’s in Dublin on November 13, 2026. For details on that and the album, head to Instagram and Facebook.

Header photo by Narayan Van Maele