Brutal, but not cruel. Gothic, but not contrived. Emotional, but not sappy.

These are the tensions at play in Skemer’s latest full-length album, Toasts & Sentiments. Four years after their debut record Benevolence, the Belgian duo—comprising legendary model Kim Peers and metal guitarist Mathieu Vandekerckhove—returns with a project as introspective as it is infectious, disseminating its own unique techno variant with melty synths and pulsing drum beats.

The sound is as lurid as it is sexy, but is this the kind of electronic music you’re supposed to dance, thrash, or fuck to? The answer is deliciously ambiguous, as Peers’s movement shows us in the music video for “Kiss Me Kill Me,” a drum-pounding slapper whose melody ebbs and flows with the quiet, slinky power of a snake. Pythons are double exposed over trippy red and green-tinged frames of Peers, the video vixen, writhing like a reptile. The serpents’ doubling provides audiences a glimpse of heaven and hell, or two sides of an argument. Montaged together, Peers and the snakes seem almost to merge: dark, misunderstood, elegant. By the end of the video, she dons contacts with vertical pupils, holding the serpents in her fishnetted hands, inky dagger nails curled around their bodies. Is she partner or predator? You decide.