Belgian post-punk and cold wave band The Ultimate Dreamers have spoken to Side-Line about “Kids Alone,” their EP on Alfa Matrix from the end of 2025. The title song, the band explain, was meant as pure irony and fun: a playful portrait of the silly things teenagers get up to once their parents look away, drawn from their own youth and from their children’s. Hearing it described as dark came as a surprise, though those reactions helped push them toward a harder re-recording in a reckless NDW/electropunk style, and they add that a few months of distance often shows a track other possibilities.
The EP’s lurch from party chaos into introspection and despair, they say, was not planned, but it suits a subject like adolescence, which swings between emotional extremes anyway. Rather than deliver a message, the band prefer to tell small stories or give voice to characters, such as a conspiracy theorist or someone living with a serious illness, whose views are not necessarily their own. The video recycles footage from “Baby Be Good,” a Betty Boop cartoon of 1935; the band joke about whether those cartoons are really so innocent and explain that they simply chose a few moments, cut them together and added the music.
Three remixes appear on the EP: Aux Animaux reworks “Kids Alone,” Mängelexemplar takes on “Spiritchaser” and Kinex Kinex revisits “Wegvliegen.” The group pick remixers carefully but admit the outcome is hard to predict, and can mean a break, a rupture or an enrichment. They single out the Aux Animaux version as a success, note that the Mängelexemplar mix turned up on several best-of-2025 lists, and call the Kinex Kinex take truly astonishing. As for whether listeners should misread the joy or the dread, the answer is that it hardly matters, since paradox, surrealism and absurd humour are what they like to cultivate. Len Lemeire produced, mixed and mastered the EP at Implant-Plant studios, and several lyrics again come from Kelly O’Hara.
About The Ultimate Dreamers
The Ultimate Dreamers come from Lessines in Belgium’s Hainaut province and are now based in Brussels. The band began when its members were teenagers in the mid-1980s; home and rehearsal-room demos were cut from about 1986 until 1990, and local gigs followed, but no studio album appeared at the time. Decades later that material was gathered on “Live Happily While Waiting For Death,” which came out digitally, on CD and on vinyl.
From 2022 the band moved their base to Brussels and joined Spleen+, the post-punk and cold wave arm of Alfa Matrix. First came the “Polarized EP” plus a two-track single pairing “Polarized” with “I Loved You?!”; then, in March 2023, “Echoing Reverie” became their first studio album of new material. Their take on The Cure’s “Lovesong” was contributed to the label’s tribute release “A Strange Play (Vol. 2) – Tribute to The Cure.” The “Violent Ghost” EP followed, with alternative versions and remixes from Front 242, Shad Shadows and Hørd, and the group are also among the acts on the 7CD post-punk anthology “Resurgence.”
The singles “Digging” and “Spiritchaser” led up to the second full-length of the band’s modern era, “Paradoxical Sleep” on 7 February 2025. Later that year they issued “Envoler,” a single sung in French, along with a companion release titled “Envoler-Wegvliegen EP,” and then revisited the “Paradoxical Sleep” songs on the “Kids Alone” EP. All The Ultimate Dreamers news is collected here on the store.
The full question-and-answer session is on Side-Line: Read the full interview on Side-Line.
Watch and listen
“Kids Alone” is available now on the Alfa Matrix store, and the EP can also be streamed on Bandcamp.
The conversation belongs to a series Side-Line is running with Spleen+ / Alfa Matrix around “Resurgence,” the 7CD post-punk, coldwave and minimal electro boxset. You can order the 7CD set in the store or get the download on Bandcamp, which is the only streaming service carrying it.