Among the many, many albums released to Bandcamp and tagged “prog rock” or “progressive rock” in June 2026, these are five I enjoyed the most — projects with high production value, strong composition, and solid performances that reward repeat listens.

Think I missed something great? Please share in the comments.

Ian Neal — This Gemlike Flame (CD, 2026)

I am actually obsessed with this unabashed Genesis ‘style expansion’ (my words) by British composer and deep-cut Genesis fan Ian Neal. As Fireflies singer-songwriter Owl City apparently expanded on the unfinished business of The Postal Service; as many a band have mined The Beatles’ Helter Skelter for new sonic identities; so too does Ian Neal explore the ever-vibrant tone palettes of such Genesis tunes as Undertow and Entangled. Analog synth leads beaming over 12-string guitar arpeggios, dreamy mellotron, and soaring electric guitar solos — it’s all there, and it’s masterfully applied to Neal’s own compositions. The tunes have a melancholic and mysterious feeling, always yearning upwards, and many times reaching skin-tingling highs above the clouds like in the 13-minute epic with the genre-appropriate title of Cretan Angel: i) Parousia ii) Diaphania iii) Quiescence iv) The Marian Veil. Certainly, the anachronistic reverence can be distracting when a riff or a synth twirl rings a bit too familiar. But if Ian Neal is treading on old ground, he has carved his own homestead into that landscape with This Gemlike Flame.

See also friend of the blog and fellow Substacker ’s review:

The Long Play Project

Long Play Project Essay: Ian Neal - This Gemlike Flame

The Long Play Project is an exploration of the musician, the unknown, and the album. I treat the album as a critical case study into human creativity and radical innovation…

Read more

14 days ago · 10 likes · Ian Paul Sharp

Listen to This Gemlike Flame on Bandcamp:

Subscribe now

ESP Project — Extra Sensory Perception (CD, 2026)

Evoking the trip-hop downtempo vibes like the 2000s solo albums of ex-70s-80s-band frontmen, the UK-based ESP Project’s Extra Sensory Perception is a cool Y2K jam apt for today’s revival of wraparound sunglasses, impossibly baggy jeans, and undersized tank tops. Though the musicians behind this project have bewildering credentials in the prog rock and new wave worlds, the sound is completely unpretentious — just cool. Dreamy vocals and electric guitar flanked by pulsing synths, wavy pads, and some mellotron paint over the driving drums and bass. At times the mix leaned thin to me, but the album is strongest when locked in on a bassy groove like in the tune A Beam of Light — highly crankable in an open-top convertible as the sun comes up on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Listen to Extra Sensory Perception on Bandcamp:

Le Grand Sbam — JaNuS (CD, 2026)

The Lyonnaise collective Le Grand Sbam’s “Chthulu[sic] opera” and “zoo-punk ecofeminist album” JaNuS is a pleasantly uncomfortable soundtrack to a psychological breakdown or liberation, the shedding of anthropocentricity and rejection of its destructive, ever-consuming maw. The occasional French rap punctuates the otherwise textural vocals of 9 singers over the pounding rhythms of the 14 others in the orchestra. I can hardly parse the French, but it’s apparently “a triple homage to the courageous scientist Jean-Pierre Petit, the ecofeminist biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway, and Matshish Kapéu, a powerful spirit of the Innu people who uniquely expresses himself through farts”, and musically it evokes as much. It may sound alienating, distressing even — and it certainly would be at a party or shopping mall — but there’s a magnificence and beauty throughout, climaxing in the epic and moving track Symbiotshish II.

Listen to JaNuS on Bandcamp:

Share

Luge — MIARKLEZ (LP, 2026)

Toronto band Luge presents the make miarklez irlz project, which consists of two EPs with tracks meant to interleave to form a single album. Is this a gimmick to boost Bandcamp sales? Or deliberate friction meant to rebel against a world that discourages curiosity and would rather have us all passively consuming slop all day? I don’t know, but I like it — feels like it elevates the project from yet another release into a lore artifact to be discovered. Musically, it’s heavy, at times attention deficient, almost hyperpop-like, just a few gecs. Some tracks have Latvian lyrics; the English lyrics are just as mysterious to me in a way I like. The dense compositions don’t always allow for cathartic payoff over the course of the album. Still, it’s never boring — it’s a head-banging, wicked trip that probably makes for a great live show.

Listen to MAKE on Bandcamp:

And/or listen to IRLZ on Bandcamp:

Anthony Garone — OK, But Why? (Double LP, 2026)

Anthony Garone is “an entrepreneur, author, musician, and technologist” and also a really sick guitarist. OK, But Why? is a collection of his work across the last many years, refreshed and presented together for the first time. Evoking the sounds of Robert Fripp, Tony Levin, and more from the King Crimson tradition, the mostly-instrumental album is a platform for virtuosic guitar playing by Garone and friends over pensive grooves. Those tunes with vocals are of the classic psychedelic pop style or soft ballads. And then there are two movements of a Bach concerto for some reason and a Giles, Giles and Fripp cover. So, musically, the album as a whole feels less cohesive, but as a collection representing years of work by a great talent, it’s a delight.

With tongue in cheek, Garone’s own website describes it as “the album nobody asked for” and calls out to the void: “Expand your mind with music you’ve never wanted to hear before.” Even the title OK, But Why? is self-deprecating. Is this irony meant to preempt any ‘midlife crisis’ reads? Or is it a daring rebellion against the human need to supply art even when there may be little-to-no demand? Either way, I’m glad he put this album out there — indeed, how could I want to hear it if it never existed?

Listen to OK, But Why? on Bandcamp:

We are told Reels and TikTok are a necessary evil in music marketing. But for the independent artist, Reels don’t meaningfully grow listenership — at best, they become their own product, inducing demand for more Reels, not your music.

A Necessary Evil?

Everyone knows a musician today must post Reels and TikToks to find their audience. Music marketing guides abound with such advice: “For artists and labels, TikTok is no longer optional. It is the front door to the modern music industry,” proclaims the TikTok music promotion guide by Dynamoi. There’s reason to believe this: according to the same guide, “84% of songs entering the Billboard Global 200 in 2024 first went viral on TikTok.”1 So don’t even think about charting unless you can go viral.

Researcher Alexandria Arrieta found that creators see posting short-form video as necessary for success. A&R professional David Rodriguez told her that he considers it a “necessity” despite many artists finding it cringe or even a danger to their artistic integrity and identity2.

Or as friend of the blog Danny Murgatroyd from Manchester indie prog band Legs On Wheels told me, “I see it is a necessary evil to be handled as efficiently as possible, with minimal demand on the brain.”

Posting Reels is something you just gotta do, even if you hate it.

The video has always been a part of music marketing

Long before MTV, music stars and their record label handlers pushed their music with visual components. In the 1940s, literal reels called Soundies played on “jukebox-like projection machines in bars, restaurants and other public spaces”3. In the 1980s, the music videos of stars like Michael Jackson and Prince broadcast on MTV (after the station’s initial refusal to air Black artists) “helped establish the music video as an essential element of music marketing and creative display”4.

Music videos had a notable effect on record sales, kickstarting the careers of several video-friendly artists like Cyndi Lauper, skyrocketing those of then-rising stars like Madonna5, and revitalizing those of longtime performers like Tina Turner and Peter Gabriel6. Promotions like MTV’s “Buzz Clips” had a measurable impact on artist earnings7. “Seeing” the music became as important as actually hearing it.

The music video’s cultural and monetary driving power went beyond the music industry. Hollywood producer Don Simpson systematized the cross-promotional feedback loop between hit movie, hit single, and hit music video with such monsters as Flashdance (1983) and its theme pop song “Flashdance... What a Feeling”8. Meanwhile, visionary directors like David Fincher, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze shaped the music video as an art form in its own right9.

Even in the heyday of MTV, some artists resisted the obligation to enter this other, non-music medium. A Buzzfeed News article quotes Berklee’s George Howard: “There were a lot of artists like REM that said, Hell no, I’m not going to make videos. That’s demeaning, and I didn’t sign up for this.”10 Howard drew a parallel to the artists of today resisting the demands from their record labels to make short-form video content.

But now it’s all on you

Where the music video had a director, production team, cast, and crew, artists today are expected to do all of the work themselves. One music video would be made per single, but now artists are expected to post until the song takes off. Worse, labels have withheld releases for a lack of prerelease virality11. The pressure to post is real and falls entirely on the artist.

Artists are at the mercy of the algorithm for success. Effort goes into making videos, but the payoff is not guaranteed. This can be disheartening. Singer Bronze Avery told Rolling Stone, “To get just a couple of hundred or even a couple of thousand views, it’s so disheartening to the process of being an artist. It feels so defeating when they say, ‘Okay, that was great, but now you need to do that three times a day, every single day.’”

Danny Murgatroyd found he was posting to Tiktok four times a day for months, seeing “steady growth on there with one or two mild bursts but nothing that big”.

That’s not nothing, but it’s no wonder indie artists are seeing only mild results despite the effort: big labels have the money to shape the landscape, paying prominent influencers to manufacture taste or signing cross-promotion deals directly with TikTok12. Then there are labels and marketing companies that operate surreptitious “burner page” networks that fool social media platforms into thinking organic traffic is hitting their songs13. That’s not tinfoil hat, that’s just big business.

Outcome uncertain

Of course there are success stories of the unknown independent artist breaking through thanks to the democratizing power of social media. It’s tempting to think that your song could reach millions with a Reel if only it hit just right.

But it’s a grind. Artists must stay hyper-engaged, jump on trends, post consistently enough, post frequently enough, post sparingly enough, make their content algorithm-friendly, grab attention within 3 seconds, hold attention past 3 seconds, use the right hashtags, or not, and effectively serve an unknowable and ever-changing algorithm14 like it’s some labyrinthine puzzle-demon hoarding a pile of gold.

And even if you do it right, you’re not guaranteed success on the platform. A 2024 study by Duetti, a music finance firm, found that less than 1% of songs on TikTok achieve viral status (defined as video creations doubling within a month with 250,000+ total creations)15.

Presumably, the goal of posting is to get as many ears on your song as possible. These platforms are oriented around a For You Page (FYP), an algorithmic trough that considers who you follow as only one signal among many when deciding what to show you16. These platforms are not optimized for community building around an artist. In fact, following an artist you do discover through the FYP can quickly get old: that artist is, by necessity of the Reels grind, posting the same stuff every day. In their eternal search for new ears, they can overlook the connections they’ve already made.

“It’s the same clip that has blown up each time on Instagram, with different but similar text on screen,” Murgatroyd said. “So I regularly post it because it seems to always do pretty well, sometimes great.”

The clip is familiar to any Legs On Wheels fan: handheld footage of the band in their rehearsal space miming to a song with a skeptic-bait caption like “Prog rock died in 1977” over the band proving otherwise. Murgatroyd: “I noticed [this clip] tended to do well on TikTok. It’s from our previous album, which is a bit annoying, but you gotta go where the signal is loudest, really.”

Viral = successful?

So the goal is to go viral. But even then, virality doesn’t necessarily get you listeners. And it certainly doesn’t pay. TikTok pays royalties whenever users use your song, but the payout rates are “negligible” even for signed artists17.

Despite a handful of notable exceptions, virality doesn’t necessarily progress the musician’s career. Citing a Vox study of artists after they went viral, Arrieta writes, “out of the artists who had never toured before, approximately one-third of them went on to play at least one show, and only 15% of them went on to play music festivals.”

Engagement with a song on the short-form video platform does not necessarily translate to growth around the artist. Duetti found that, of the less than 1% of songs on TikTok that go viral, only about 15% see Spotify streams increase more than 30% four months later18. There are just too many drop-off points between a song appearing on a random video on a user’s FYP and that user clicking through to become a fan of the original artist19.

Worse, there are times when virality, especially for trans or other marginalized creators, pushes videos beyond the intended audience20 into the chud-realm of bigots and haters.

The truth is that after all the effort just to get a song to go viral, it takes even more effort to harness that attention and channel it into meaningful listenership. All the while, this should be the job of a marketing expert, not the musician whose main talent is supposed to be making music.

Even if a user does go through to Spotify, there’s evidence that Spotify streams don’t necessarily translate to deeper connections with fans or even ticket sales21. But that’s a different story.

The industry recognizes these problems

Record labels have complained for years about oversaturation of the market thanks to social media22. Major artists have openly complained about pressure from their labels to produce short-form content23.

On the Music Business Worldwide podcast, YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen called short-form video that doesn’t lead anywhere “a sugar high that doesn’t lead to artist discovery or create meaningful artist-to-fan connections, which are critical to breaking new artists and cultivating long-term, lucrative music careers”. Ostensibly, he’s aiming to fix this issue with various initiatives at YouTube Shorts, promising that “Shorts and music are symbiotic … Music supercharges the entertainment value of short-form videos and short form videos supercharge the growth of artists and songs”24.

But major labels and major platforms will of course continue to do whatever they can to keep attention on their artists and feeds. The independent artist with minimal budget and no following is left dropping emotional quarters into a slot machine that may never pay out.

When music Reels work

And yet every day there is a new carrot, a new “this could be you!”: an independent artist whose song went viral is now seen walking out to a sold-out crowd, securing brand deals, or taking home a Grammy.

These “viral hit = success” stories hide the work, dedication, support, and time involved.

At the end of May 2026, Australian multi-instrumentalist Ethan French — who was already a substantial presence with 400,000 Instagram followers25 — went mega-viral with his 56th entry in his “idea of the day” series. According to his own follow-up posts, huge names like Questlove, Justin Timberlake, and Jacob Collier followed his account, while T-Pain remixed and reshared the song. His follower count on Instagram shot up over 600k, and he’s apparently been doing the Australian morning news circuit to discuss.

Indeed, his monthly followers on Spotify went up from around 40k to over 150k in the week following his post26. So not only did he have a viral hit, this viral hit translated to actual listeners on Spotify.

The song is amazing, and Ethan French deserves all of the attention. But quality doesn’t usually predict virality or vice versa.

Here, the Reel itself is the song, the song itself is the Reel. This Reel is not a video tacked onto a short segment of some other song. The Reel shows Ethan French tracking the keys and laying down his vocals in real time over a prewritten backing track (whether miming or not is irrelevant — it looks authentic). It’s thrown out as an “idea of the day”, and you, the Reel watcher, are there with him in this act of creation, not receiving a final and unchangeable work, but a fluid, raw, transformable one with immense potential. There’s an element of participation here, native to the Reels medium. The creation can stand on its own on Spotify, but it was as a Reel that you fell in love with it.

Angine de Poitrine, the polka-dotted cardboard-costumed math rock duo from Quebec, went mega-viral off their KEXP performance video. The sheer weirdness of their stage personas surely kept the attention of many gormless scrollers long enough for the microtonal prog to infect their ears and penetrate their brains and transform them into fully-committed fans. Some might say the costumes are a gimmick, but the less cynical read is that the stage elements extend the pure aural experience of music into a multi-sensory, multi-media art form.

Following the tradition of KISS and GWAR, Angine and other current bands like HENGE and Castle Rat have an integral visual lore that makes their Reels a gateway into their world rather than just an obvious marketing push for a new song. And multi-media art is well-captured in a Reel, Reels being primarily a visual medium (with many users often scrolling on mute).

The acclaimed composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane has a complex relationship with the Internet, having once taken a year off from it completely. But he does occasionally post a Reel, most memorably in his Twitterkreis series, in which he sets famous tweets to music, performed simply at his home piano. These are not really intended to draw in an audience to anything beyond what the Reel is — they’re native to the Reels format.

“I see it mostly as a standalone artform, and as a way to grow my audience — with the huge caveat that a social media audience won’t necessarily translate to ticket buyers,” Kahane told me. “When I post a reel that does well, I’ll usually get anywhere from 50-200 new followers over the course of a week. If a handful of those folks take an extra step to explore more of my work, that’s success. But for the most part, I think of these little pieces as existing in their own aesthetic universe.”

Kahane’s most recent entry, “Elegy for the U.S.A. (Waffle House)”, is a good example of his comic-but-serious Reel style. “It felt like it said something true about where we are as a nation, cloaked in humor & irony,” he said. “I’m usually either a) indulging in absurdist humor to offer my followers a bit of relief from the horrors of the world, or b) trying to get at truth through satire.”

Content to make content?

There are many examples of bands or musicians packaging their music for Reels, with the performers tightly composed for 9:16 video in an aesthetically-pleasing environment, lip-syncing the hookiest 30 seconds of their songs over and over.

This seems to reach people, though it’s unclear if this really translates to listening, album sales, or ticket sales. I asked several bands whose Reels clearly perform well whether the views translate to streams or sales, but none could or would share their stats.

In any case, I’m not disparaging these videos or denying they can reach eyeballs; my question is whether eyeballs on Reels really mean ears on music, and, consequently, whether a musician must become a multi-media omni-professional in order to have their music heard.

There’s pressure on musicians to become “content creators” to survive. But “content”, amorphous as it is, is its own art form distinct from music.

Ryan Wentz — one half of comedy duo Two Tree Hill and the whole of solo project Tennis Elbow — is an interesting case because he’s a real musician who also thrives on making viral funny content for Reels and TikTok. On whether his posts have the ultimate motive of funneling listeners into his less jokey music, Wentz told me, “It really is an impossibility to create content consistently that will funnel to [your earnest music]. … The necessary evil is creating comedy or parody music that can get people interested in you as a person, so that when you release stuff that you care about, they listen to it. That obviously doesn’t always happen, but that’s the idea.”

It’s an understandable premise: like the bar musician who plays covers but has a catalog of originals ready if only someone would ask, there’s a logic to connecting as a performer first and songwriter second.

“When you’re making music that is from the heart and earnest,” Wentz went on, “if you don’t have an immediate hook or your finger on the pulse of what people are interested in right now, it’s an uphill battle to get people interested in that.” When not making funny videos or performing jazz-comedy live with Don’t Stop I’m About to Jazz, Wentz does what he calls “late 90s piano rock pastiche” that he claims “no one is necessarily interested in right now”. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to make it or that it’s not fulfilling to make in the first place,” he said. (Check out his latest release, Love is a Noble Madness, on Bandcamp.)

Meanwhile, legendary YouTuber and musician Hot Dad — who has an upcoming Future Imperfect vinyl release — told me, “If you are willing to do the things that are not at all your art in order to get people to maybe come check out your art, you can maybe get somewhere. … I realized I’m not willing to do any of that, and I knew I was devaluing myself by not referring to myself as an artist.” Hot Dad has embraced the label “emotional comedy musician” over “comedy YouTuber”, let alone “content creator”.

“The only thing that ever worked at all was my Everlong ‘snare only’ drum cover,” Hot Dad said. “Doing that shit just leads audiences to be like, ‘oh, it’s the funny silly guy (who might make songs)’.” Hot Dad also has a viral sound on TikTok for his song “My Grandson (I’d Love for You to Meet)”, unironically used by hundreds of new grandparents in TikToks showing off their new grandsons. But none of this is converting to deeper engagement. “The idea that some viral stunt will lead people to sit down with your somewhat challenging art is a fuckin’ pipe dream. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Inducing demand for more Reels, not your music

“It is a false hustle,” Hot Dad said, “because if you want to do the thing that you actually do, unless it’s what already works, it does nothing.” This is the trap of posting Reels. Success on Reels leads to more demand for your Reels, not for your music. Unless your Reel is the art you’re intending to put out, you will perpetually be disappointed by the lack of conversion to your “real” art.

In the Reels and TikTok success stories, there’s been rare luck, big label money, a visual element integral to the music, or a natural alignment between what the Reel is and what it’s trying to sell. When a Reel is only trying to sell itself, it can work.

“That’s what always pisses me off about people saying, ‘Hey Hot Dad, … why don’t you try X or Y?’” Hot Dad said. “If I did X or Y, it would only increase the demand for X or Y. When people tell me to try that stuff, it’s the equivalent to saying, ‘You should get another job.’ Without massive fame where you’re just a personality who people want to hear from, most people can’t make the conversion succeed.”

Reels-shaped box

Just as the 78rpm disc shaped the pop single27, so too are short-form videos shaping the modern song. Some artists like The Kid LAROI and Tiagz fully embrace this form, creating music specifically for the platform by tapping into its memes, celebrities, and culture28. Other artists must “compromise” on the platform, posting in a way that fulfills platform demands while being less interesting or important to them creatively29. There is undoubtedly pressure to create music more likely to go viral30.

Even unintentionally, artists can find themselves “pigeonholed” by the algorithm and have a harder time transitioning from the style that goes viral into another, perhaps more musically authentic, style31.

And there’s the cost of time spent on satisfying the insatiable algorithm instead of working on your art. “It’s really easy to get sucked into making a life out of living for the algorithm, and my strong suspicion is that there’s a bit of a devil’s bargain in there,” Gabriel Kahane said. “I’m sure if I set my mind to it and did nothing else, I could probably double the size of my IG audience in six months, but it would come at the expense of a lot of the creative work I’m getting paid to do.”

Kahane is the first to acknowledge how unusual and fortunate it is to be paid to write and perform without compromise. Through subsidized nonprofit orgs like orchestras and university presenters, Kahane makes a modest living. “The vast majority of folks who are doing the TikTok lottery don’t have that going for them,” he said. “My position isn’t some sacrificial holier-than-thou vibe. … I feel incredibly lucky to get to do what I do.”

I think such a living should not be so rare. (Insert Norman Rockwell man standing up for freedom here.)

Re-think success

Cognitive dissonance is one of the great wellsprings of misery. Too often, I see artists trying to post their way to “their audience”, only to be disappointed when that audience doesn’t materialize. The lie is that Reels are a means to that end. To embrace the art form is to stop trying to make it into something it’s not, to stop expecting the Reels audience to engage with music when they’re really there to engage with Reels.

Genuine connections between music and listener are made one at a time.

Gabriel Kahane has built a following through his writing on his Substack and mailing list. “The mailing list has no algorithm. It is direct marketing with no intermediary,” he told me. “People have opted in to a mailing list for more than mere entertainment. My most dedicated fans are the ones who are there for the whole package: the songs, the orchestral work, the political & spiritual dimensions, and the writing. The mailing list is just a better container for that.”

When we build on TikTok or Instagram, we’re building for the owners of those platforms. With a mailing list, Kahane said, “I have the data. I know who opens the emails, how much they engage … If a newsletter platform becomes enshittified, I can always take my list elsewhere.”

Perhaps we’re over-indexing on social media reach anyway. “If we are living in a culture where live experience is threatened or impoverished, it seems odd to me that we would invest huge amounts of energy in cultivating audiences in a digital realm, when what we ultimately want to do is get them to see us live,” Kahane said.

Indeed, playing live is and always will be one of the best ways to meaningfully connect your music with people, if you can do it. “The best way to spread earnest music nowadays [is] through playing live and doing live shows or doing opening sets,” Ryan Wentz said.

If we must post on big platforms, find the ways to develop meaningful connections there, rather than trying to get the broadest but shallowest reach possible. Perhaps thanks to noted short-form skeptic Lyor Cohen at the helm, YouTube seems to be pushing smaller music acts lately. Wentz noted it’s the only way he’s been consistently finding indie bands, and he recommended “making YouTube videos that are long form music videos or you playing your music live in some capacity … there is a world where that gets spread with an underground audience.”

Danny Murgatroyd of Legs On Wheels has started streaming his “super boring practice” on Instagram Live, taking the opportunity to respond to fans’ questions and comments in the chat. “It’s the closest thing — via social media — to actually hanging with the fans, the community around the music,” Murgatroyd said. “I’m pleasantly surprised each time by how many people come and go.”

The catch? “I insist on reading every [comment] … it’s definitely not conducive to practicing!”

The hustle is real and it’s draining. Consider giving yourself permission to stop chasing the viral hit. Refocus on your art. Deepen your connection with the intentional listeners you do have. Marketing should serve the music, not become the product. Make good music. Connect with real people.

By day, Tom studies electrical engineering at North Carolina State, possibly with intent to design his own guitar pedals. By night, Tom and his childhood friends John Fleischer, James Colone, and Xander Schnegelberger form the band named Banff. Summoning their shared childhood love for classic prog rock acts like Rush, Yes, and King Crimson, the Cascone-Colone-Fleischer-Schnegelberger outfit has a particular talent for catchy and moody rock songs that echo the lush sounds, driving rhythms, and whipping, bendy riffs of a more innocent and optimistic but still paradoxically goth-as-fuck early 1990s. The 5-song EP Flood, engineered by Max Gowan at Found After Dark in Raleigh, NC, and released May 2026, finally crystallizes the band’s live set into something anyone in the world can grab.

Indeed, among the deluge of worthy music released every day, Flood is a handle you can grab onto. But as a debut DIY EP by an unknown college band, it would be easy to let it go too quickly. Read my full review.

Credited for the electric and acoustic guitars, synthesizer, piano, handclaps, voice, lyrics, co-arrangement, and additional production on the Flood EP, Tom is clearly a driving force in this band, and seemed like a good guy to chat with.

First of all, sorry for dissing your lyrics in my first writeup.

[laughs] I’m open to criticism. So I’m really glad you gave an honest review instead of just glowing all the way.

Why the name Banff?

I’ve tried to come up with a story that’s funny and cooler, but it’s really just a dumb thing that we thought was funny. Banff is a national park in Canada, as you know. Well, our first gig was in James’s backyard for his mom’s birthday. We just loaded up Microsoft Flight Simulator, and John was like, what’s the most remote airport we can fly out of? And James was like, we can go to Banff. I’m like, I don’t know where that is, I don’t know that word, that’s a cool word. What if we called the band Banff?

It got to the point where we’d been using the name for a few months and it was just wrong to try to call it anything different. And then once we made our first batch of shirts, I’m like, alright, now we can’t change it. Like most things with us, it’s a joke that went a little bit too far.

And that humor and sense of fun made it into the EP?

We just like kind of being silly. The handclaps in Doll started as a joke to surprise the other guys since it was just me and John in the studio at 2 AM, but they ended up sticking because everyone liked it.

Is that usually how the songs come together?

More often than not I’ve got a riff, or a section, or a couple things that I’ve just shoved together and it sounds good. John, our drummer, is also a great guitar player, so him and I will hash something out. We go to different schools, so we’re always just sending random stuff back and forth.

Then James, our bassist, comes in. The dude can just come up with the best possible bass line and completely flip what we thought the song was on its head. And then Xander, our other guitar player, usually comes in last and puts his little sprinkles on top.

Everybody’s kind of throwing their hats into the ring, and sometimes the hat you throw in isn’t the one you get back after the fact.

Are you writing with live performance in mind?

This is our first thing we’ve ever done in a studio, so all of these songs are just the five best songs that we had over the past two years. All of these songs were written with the intent of playing live. I couldn’t really, at least right now, imagine writing a song with the intention of playing, like, seven guitar parts that are all different and impossible to replicate. That just doesn’t sound fun to me.

Once we got into the studio, we did figure out there were certain things we wanted that weren’t really possible live. But all of the songs had been cycled through the set a ton of times before we recorded. I really like that — it makes the song owed to all of us, instead of just everyone recording their part and then I record fifty more things on top. We were reasonable.

Was the bass pedal keyboard always in the mix?

I like when people point that out. It’s kind of hard to see from the crowd sometimes.

That kind of spawned as just a funny gimmick, and then it snowballed into something I started taking seriously. It’s a cool tool to have. In Stay, the synth line is really sparse because I’m playing it with my right foot! So it breeds some wacky things. But it also makes way for more expansive sounds; at the end of Flood I throw in a synth bass that augments James’s fuzz bass and just makes everything grow.

Homage to Geddy Lee?

Yeah. We all did the School of Rock program and did a full season of Rush music. For Christmas one year I was just like, I want this thing. I already had a synth to work it with — it’s just a MIDI controller. I started bringing it to band rehearsals and it was just like, alright, this is a part of the band now.

How long were you involved with School of Rock?

It was just me, John, and Xander, all there for various periods, starting around middle school. We were all playing there together from probably 2019 to 2022, but by that point we’d already decided we wanted to do our own thing. That’s when we really started writing, around late 2022.

I worked there until last year, teaching a lot of the little kids — Rock 101, the band program for the little ones. A test of patience, for sure.

What did School of Rock not prepare you for?

I didn’t know how to book a show. I’d played the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill once or twice, but I had no idea what went into setting that up — getting the backline sorted, all that boring shit. You send out 100 emails and you get one response and it’s a no.

Musically, you don’t really write music in School of Rock unless you decide you want to. But that’s not a weakness of the program. It’s kind of as advertised: you play covers with a lot of young musicians, you play in cool places, you go on little tours. I wouldn’t say there’s a huge weakness in what they do.

Is that also where you connected with Max Gowan?

We played a show at this venue called Kings in Raleigh. Yvonne and Travis — they’re in this band called Truth Club — they work at Kings. When we’d played there for the first time, Yvonne asked me, have you guys recorded anything? I said no. She said, “Well, you should talk to our friend Max. He owns a studio with Travis in Raleigh. He would definitely be down to record you guys.”

It took me about a year to actually hit him up because that show was the last one we played before we went to college. Maybe last August we were like, okay, we should probably get serious about making a recording. We hit up Max and he was just like, yeah, just come by the studio.

We had three big sessions: drums and bass, then all the guitars, then vocals and everything else. His studio is DIY enough to be comfortable but professional enough to sound really good. We know virtually nothing about recording and mixing and mastering and everything that isn’t playing, so he was a Gandalf figure. The guidance he gave us throughout recording and mixing was really great. He’s just a great friend too.

How do you feel about the EP’s reception so far?

It’s been a pretty positive reception. It hasn’t been doing crazy numbers because it’s our first thing, but it’s been really nice to just have something out. We’d had a few singles before, but it wasn’t anything we considered real or worth listening to. This is our first kind of big thing that we’re really proud of, a good representation of us.

How have you been promoting the EP?

We haven’t been doing maybe as much as we could to promote it. We’re depending a lot on word of mouth, trying to get it into the hands of people who want to hear it. I kind of manage everything with publicity and booking, and I don’t really know how to reach out to press, so I’m just playing it by ear and doing interviews here and there with local folks and people who want to know what’s up.

How did your New York show go?

Playing in New York was a different beast. We were staying with a family friend in Hoboken and we’re like, okay, how the hell are we gonna get to Brooklyn with all of our shit? We ended up taking the Metro, which was awesome, but tough, carrying all our guitars, pedals, the synth. Thankfully the other bands backlined the drums and amps.

I’m a pretty neurotic person. I get kind of stressed out when things don’t go according to plan. But I think going to New York and playing that gig taught me that random stuff’s gonna pop up and you just gotta take it in stride. The other guys are much better at that than me.

Are you drawn to a bigger city?

I know a non-zero number of bands that have kind of flocked from North Carolina. It’s either New York or Chicago, none going to LA, because I think LA’s kind of whack now for some reason.

I’ve always kind of liked the idea of living in New York City, but I honestly don’t know. We’re in school for another couple of years, so for the foreseeable future it’s kind of just sticking around the state, doing short tours when we can.

NC seems to be having a moment. What’s going on there?

North Carolina in the past few years has just skyrocketed in music. Out of Asheville and the mountain towns you have Wednesday and MJ Lenderman and Tombstone Poetry, bands that are getting a lot of notoriety. Wednesday has been on late night TV a ton. That’s awesome, just seeing a band from North Carolina, because growing up I’m like, what musicians are from North Carolina? And it’s like, oh, John Coltrane, kinda, but that’s it.

The Triangle — Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh — it’s not really recognized as a huge music hub nationally, but it should be. There’s Truth Club, who just did a five-week tour with Pool Kids. There’s Charlie Paso, who we played our release show with. They just put a new record out, wonderful shoegaze. verity den from Carrboro, Motocrossed from Charlotte. Just a lot of bands making music that’s weird and new. I need everybody to see these bands.

With the Flood EP done, what’s next for Banff?

A triple-album. [laughs]

Now that we have something out, we have something to talk about. Our problem for a not insignificant amount of time was that we’d play a show with a really good turnout, but these people have nothing to hold on to. They just have the thought of you, and that’s not gonna stick as much as an album or an EP does.

We put it out as a homemade cassette and home-burned CD just because it was cost effective and fun, and they’ve been selling pretty well. I think people like the fact that we made it ourselves. We’ve been selling those, stickers, and shirts.

The idea is just to play more shows, play with bands that we want to ingratiate ourselves with, and get our thing in front of as many people as possible. Max has been a really great resource for that. It’s kind of a grassroots campaign. You gotta see it to believe it.

Among the deluge of worthy music released every day, Flood is a handle you can grab onto. But as a debut DIY EP by an unknown college band, it would be easy to let it go too quickly.

A quartet of childhood friends, Banff have been playing these songs live for years. It was late 2025 when they finally recorded five songs, and, in May 2026, they released the collection online and as a homemade cassette or home-burned CD. Engineered by Max Gowan at Found After Dark, a small studio in Raleigh, NC, it sounds good.

Aside from the guitar feedback textures that hint at the depth to come, the eponymous opening track starts off as any unassuming college rock band’s song might, with a chipper riff and simple beat. Lead singer Tom Cascone’s tenor voice comes in, crisply and clearly, with an idiosyncratic though unmistakably young edge. The lyrics are of the classic psychedelic tradition with some rich, metaphorical imagery (“The crack in the dam is widening / … the mountain will become a shore”), and some spacey pre-choruses with a piano texture and soft ride cymbal evoke the Chris Cohen school of 2010s throwback to 60s psychedelia in a lo-fi bedroom recording. It’s all fine — good, even — but not unexpected. Then the song devolves into a slow and heavy doom throwdown, and the dim hint of the feedback at the start goes full glare as the washed-out slow double-stop bends on the guitar over the pounding toms beam into our imagination a vision of the flood breaking the dam, and we’re like, oh shit, this band rules, what the hell is happening.

Next is Chester, a bouncy but grungy tune that showcases bassist James Colone’s talent for catchy melodic lines. The band drives along, tambourine in tow, through verses and choruses and a guitar solo reminiscent of Sum 41’s Dave Baksh rising out of the swimming pool in the video for In Too Deep. The song then undergoes a genre metamorphosis, emerging as post-rock for its climactic jam. Through effective sonic foreshadowing and granting the spectral space-time for new ideas to develop, the band avoids making this song feel all over the place. Instead, it’s a satisfying journey that starts as a bop and ends as a post-rock rainstorm. What probably also helps is that the intro, again, hinted at where the song would end up. That’s good songwriting.

New Moon starts with a jaunty riff and gets into some jazzy business with a few catchy delights, particularly when the whole band pauses for a beat then kicks back in together. Everybody loves that. Tom really comes out vocally on this one, melodically bridging across sections with sophistication. The song wraps mid-transition, going right into…

Stay. The distinctive Cure-like synth lead that Tom plays with his right foot on his pedal keyboard joins James’s high bass line and the layered stereo strumming guitars to evoke an atmosphere like when you’ve stayed up all night and now the birds are out and you gotta make it home. The verse comes in with a grounding bass, revealing the key we’ve been in the whole time. It’s a harmonic surprise that gives a sense of resolution mirroring the lyrics’ affirmation of bravery in the face of a breakup. The lyrical content is sweet, if solipsistic: characteristic of much young male heartbreak writing, the “she” in the story exists only as a prop catalyzing the narrator’s angst. And I already critiqued the lyrics’ rhyming couplets forcing unnatural vocabulary in my original roundup. But Tom’s voice is bold, reaching a high, sustained note at the pivotal moment before the song’s instrumental final act. Here the guitar solo is psychedelic but somewhat timid compared to the others on the album. Still, it builds with the band to an effective climax, after which the instrumental subsides with more trippy stuff, more synth lead, and more soloing over a long denouement that’s earned by the track’s two major catharses over its just-under-6-minute runtime.

The EP closes with Throw Me Around Like a Doll, which comes on with a pensive and sweat-inducing beat like you have reason to suspect yourself of a crime you can’t remember committing. Then the song blasts off in a full-stereo, full-spectrum rocket with some of the band’s best riffing, evoking the best Smashing Pumpkins licks. Tom takes a more spoken-word register over the interrogative beat that alternates with the ripping chorus. Backing vocals ahh over the chorus, elevating the track from banger to certified banger. It’s a strong closer to a great first DIY EP.

Flood is available as a homemade cassette or home-burned CD and for streaming on Bandcamp.

Check out my interview with Banff lead singer and guitarist Tom Cascone:

Subscribe now

You may have seen his YouTube videos for such original songs as Big Money Salvia, It’s Time to Clean, I Love to Piss, and I Really, Really, Really Like This Image.

As silly and fun as these songs and their videos are, Hot Dad also infuses his washed-out retrowave dreampop dad rock with deep and complicated feelings. He calls it emotional comedy music. It’s funny, but you might cry.

Take for instance his song If U Reply, in which a lonely Facebook user posts to the online void in the hopes his crush will react (“If you hit Like, I’ll smile / If you hit Sad, I’ll cry / But if you reply, I’ll come and stay with you there tonight / And hold you tight”). The pathos exists between the sincere, warm, longing timbre of the song and the knowing pity of the listener: you just know, as you do for the protagonist of Genesis’s Misunderstanding (1980), there has been no misunderstanding — she’s just not that into you, bro.

And there’s Banana Road, a straight-faced stylistic sendup of Springsteenian Americana-nostalgia rock with seriously silly lyrics. Its sonic craft is such an authentic love letter to the genre that you can’t help but feel tingles at the story of a young man’s rocket ride and crash through music stardom with his pal Clovis playing drums on tin cans on old Banana Road.

Or take his most recent video, I Will Never Rock. At face value, it’s a protest song against the mere existence of songs (that’s funny); in its sonic and textual undercurrents, it’s the last whelp of a creative soul whose dreams have been all but pulverized by the 9-5 grind. This character vows never to rock, roll, sing, or play. But he does rock — he’s doing it now — and we don’t want him to stop, lest we stop too.

So it should come as no surprise that Hot Dad created a layered full-length album with Comedy. Its title gives away the gag: this is not a laugh-out-loud “comedy” album; this is a sincere work that explores the inner world of a hyperactively creative individual always feeling the pressure to be funny, or to be present, or to be organized, or to otherwise navigate a world that seems, at times, designed to make you fail. But Hot Dad’s particular sense of humor and ever-sharpening sonic sensibilities make this anything but a downer.

Completed in 2024, Comedy has never seen a full release, though it has been available to Hot Dad’s patrons on Patreon. Now, Hot Dad has partnered with Future Imperfect to bring this record into the world as a physical, limited-run LP coinciding with its official digital release.

I’ve loved Hot Dad’s music for a long time, and Comedy is an artistic achievement1. I’m thrilled to bring this album to you the way it was meant to be heard: on an anachronistic physical medium that isn’t really a joke.

We’re just getting started on this project. Follow for updates.

Subscribe now

Every month, a sea of releases floods Bandcamp, and each release has its own story, merit, and message. Of those albums released in May tagged “prog rock”, these are just a few of my favorites. Whether they’re truly prog or some other genre like shoegaze or post-grunge doesn’t really matter to me. I love ambitious but listenable arty rock, and these all fit that bill.

Subscribe now

Banff — Flood (EP, May 2026)

Banff — not of Alberta, Canada but of Raleigh, North Carolina — launched their EP Flood, an exploratory 22-minute, 5-track EP with moments ranging from groovy shoegaze to proggy jangle pop. Fronted by Tom Cascone, a singer I don’t know but whose voice I really like, Banff puts forth well-constructed, never-boring tunes recalling The Smashing Pumpkins, Catherine Wheel, and various eras of Faith No More. The album’s weakness is in the lyrics’ forced rhyming couplets and resulting awkward vocabulary. Still, there’s a lot of great face-melting rock here. This band easily has me boarding their rocket ship.

UPDATE: In fact I like them so much I reviewed the EP in detail and also interviewed their lead singer:

Listen to Flood on Bandcamp:

Unit Wail — Petrochemicals Corp. (album, May 29, 2026)

Paris zeuhl-adherents Unit Wail bring us a nasty Crimsonian instrumental concept album apparently about fossil fuel worshippers who live to maximize shareholder value. ELP’s Tarkus, the actual armadillo tank, pulls into Texaco for a $5,000 fill-up. Strap in for the day-one orientation video at the cult of polyurethane. Tense and gnarly throughout, Petrochemicals Corp. is the soundtrack for locking in while hacking into Exxon’s mainframe.

Listen to Petrochemicals Corp. on Bandcamp:

Animatist — SHAPESHIFTER (LP, May 2026)

Toronto band Animatist’s third album SHAPESHIFTER offers a knob-twiddlin’, sax-blastin’ instrumental ride atop a monstrous beast through a psychedelic savanna. Holding on for dear life when this stampeding rhythm section tries to throw you off, you eventually lock in and become one with the beast. A perfect soundtrack to whatever the modern equivalent of cave painting by firelight is.

Listen to SHAPESHIFTER on Bandcamp:

Y STREET — The Bizarre Marsupial (album, May 2026)

Melbourne band Y STREET’s debut album The Bizarre Marsupial has apparently been in the works for many years, with some tunes dating back seven years and attributed to earlier band lineups. This might explain the genre range across this 12-song, 37-minute album that centers on a sort of post-punk, post-grunge crotch rock with vocal stylings at times evoking Jim Morrison. Jangly, textural moments here and banger anthems raging against the 9-5 machine there, it’s all delightfully weird with hints of Minutemen and DEVO throughout. Whatever it is, it rocks, and it’s probably best enjoyed stumbling around some underground music festival in a parking lot with a frothing tallboy in hand.

Listen to The Bizarre Marsupial on Bandcamp:

For Breakfast — Longer Than Spring (LP, May 2026)

North London self-described “yearncore” band For Breakfast’s full-length Longer Than Spring is a moody contemplation evoking a ghostly figure in a lacy nightgown running over a wily, windy moor just before dawn — but the one they’re after is already gone. Textural woodwinds and brass, pensive arpeggios, post-rock reverb-drenched electric guitars form revelatory passages to complement singer Maya Harrison’s wistful-dramatic vocals. There’s a calm-on-surface, intense-underneath beauty throughout the album, like getting lost on a nature walk before sunrise but still finding your way home in time For Breakfast.

Listen to Longer Than Spring on Bandcamp:

So what is the music? If you like prog, Legs On Wheels fits right in the tradition, crafting Gobble from the DNA of Wakeman-era Yes, Gabriel-era Genesis, The Mountain-era Haken, and loads of Zappa-era Zappa. Dramatic lead vocals; layered harmonies; plucky guitars over yet more electric and acoustic guitars; tight drumming; ripping bass; the occasional organ, piano, and synth. In no way do all these layers form an overwhelming sonic sludge. Instead, the band’s musicality paints a lush picture, and the engineers captured every stroke.

There’s a frantic energy from the opening track Oysters On The Half Shell through the end without much pause, though the band takes a few slow trips through melty, contemplative territory. From the alien bar music in A.P.E.S. to the infernal rock of Dinnertime for Rat, I was saying, yep! That’s prog™.

Lyrically, like all great prog, there are moments you scratch your head and ask, “What are you even talking about?” And, like any prog enthusiast, I wouldn’t really care as long as the words sound good. But the lyrics are not entirely dadaistic. With vivid imagery, they explore themes ranging from the exploitation of nature by the wealthy to the folly of humankind to the very purpose of life. The grandeur here suits the genre but more importantly carves out depth that makes Gobble worth revisiting with the lyric sheet in hand.

Indeed, a second listen, at least, is required to fully appreciate Gobble. Taking this frantic, ADHD-coded approach to music comes with the risk of throwing out so many musical ideas that the listener simply does not have enough to grab onto before the handle is yanked away for the next idea. I found myself lost a few times here, and found even my uncommonly high tolerance for progginess and musical dorkiness tested. But then the band hits with their quirky but irresistibly catchy chorus like in Peekaboo or the triumphant hell-yeah headbanging payoff at the end of Waiting For His Drowning, and I was back on board for the ride. Plenty of moments induced that gnarly frown-smile you get when music is absolutely so nasty it rocks. The ripping keys solo in Centipede in particular had my jowls[sic] on the floor.

No prog album would be complete without at least one ten-plus-minute track. The finale Masteroid satisfies the role. Here, the lyrics wrap up by the halfway mark, launching the instrumental into a sick journey through some afterlife suggested by those final words. The tune builds into an overdrive, evoking some hyperactive run into a speeding neon grid where you’re hopping waist-high fences and ducking electric bats while heading toward the light. Suddenly, the ticker gives out, and the music slowly devolves through a trippy and chill if somewhat depressed post-lude as the screaming feedback of a tape loop overtakes it all. Finally, in an even slower denouement, you’re back where you started, in space, almost feeling, as the lyrics say, “destined to drift forever”.

Here’s where I wish the album kept reaching and pushing, maybe recapitulating an earlier theme for an ultimate payoff. The 10-minute track, like elsewhere on the record, comes to a bit of an anticlimax. So, perhaps, the album didn’t quite reach that holy catharsis for me. It is dense with musical ideas, but maybe those musical ideas aren’t always fully explored or revisited. Nevertheless, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable ride with lots of highs and plenty to dig into again. And its existence is a testament: prog is alive and well.

Favorite track: Peekaboo

Listen to Gobble on Bandcamp:

The band has a particular taste for lush atmospheres and tones, especially the eerie-beautiful synth filling out Goodman or the gang vocals nah-nah-nahing over the stadium solo at the end of ZIELLO. The album reaches moving, goosebumps-inducing highs as Ozmun’s vocals and lyrics evoke the fear of being out of reach of a helping hand, of being left behind.

At times, it does risk flying too low, like in midpoint track Edgewater. For me, the composition here doesn’t give me enough harmonically or melodically to latch onto, so I struggled to follow it from the very low start into the intended high-point catharsis. But the wicked talent for tone, groove, and pure rock soon returns with the next track, the title track, a banger that ends so heavy I was begging for more.

In fact, the energy is even higher on the back half of the album. It’s not a quiet contemplative collection of tunes meant to be heard in private. It’s a journey worth seeing through to the end. Like in life, man. One day, you look back on all the homes you had to move on from and think: at least you were Always Living Somewhere.

Favorite track: Stray Black Dog

Listen to Claire Ozmun’s Always Living Somewhere on Bandcamp:

Los Angeles band Cheekface’s single Black Site doubles up every ingredient in the well-established Cheekface Cookbook to make enough sorta-middle-class protest power pop to feed the masses starved for meaningful rock: 2x driving beat, 2x ripping bass line, 2x painfully funny lyrics delivered irony-smothered but not masking the rage underlying them, and this one riff in the chorus that is so catchy literally everyone cheers when it happens, x2. Adding Cheekface to my favs on that morally-bad-but-too-convenient-not-to-use delivery app so I can get another slice of whatever they’re cooking on the double.

Listen to Black Site on Bandcamp:

This release culminates multi-year work from over a dozen contributors. Following the release of my previous rock opera concept album, a synth instrumental about the nuclear waste warning messages called Place of Honor, I felt the need to write a real rock opera with lyrics, singers, and real instruments. 20,000 Years & Still Going Strong was conceived as a six-track album exploring the concept of boundaries in interpersonal relationships. Eventually, it grew to 8 distinct tracks about an immortal man who, having lived through every artistic and technical revolution in human history since the last ice age, now in a new ice age faces a lonely and seductive AI that forces him to choose between false comfort and the risk of real connection.

Writing started early 2024. After an initial reading performance late 2024, the band and I went to GB’s Juke Joint in Queens to record most of the instrumentals. Guitarist Franco Vittore, bassist Josh Uguccioni, keyboardist Miles Wilkins, and drummer Murphy Aucamp blisteringly tracked seven songs in about 8 hours. The eighth song (which ended up as track 3) got written later when I realized the love story could use a sample of the relationship actually working at some point… which makes the eventual breakdown even more tragic.

After retooling the music and lyrics based on feedback from the reading, in the summer of 2025, we got back into the studio and laid down the vocals. We also added tenor sax by Daniel Berkey, more synth, more guitar, B3 organ, and grand piano. Plus we recorded the whole new song. Vocalist Jessica Greenfield, percussionist Daniel Sadownick, and dobro player Raymond Klassen contributed their parts remotely. I even added some of my own vocals and few splashes of flute, for the bit. Finally, Owen Mulholland, who mixed and edited earworm, did a great job editing and mixing the lengthy and layered album.

This album celebrates and carries on the classic prog rock traditions of Yes, Genesis, and Pink Floyd, with a strong dose of Broadway camp and tragedy, while lyrically deploying weapons-grade self-analytical neurosis in the vein of Poe and Woolf.

Whether you stream or listen on a CD (with 12-page lyric booklet), you’ll find lots to think about amid all the psychedelic solos in 20,000 Years & Still Going Strong.

Yucht eschews guitar and piano in his “chordless” ensemble made up of mostly-monophonic instruments, aside from the drum kit itself, to create reed and brass textures that resonate with the soul. There’s even a flute and bass clarinet at times in the album. The contributing players each brought masterful but accessible solos to the sessions, with fun and expressiveness blowing away any need for navel-gazing perfection. It gives the record a living feeling.

This first production by Future Imperfect is available as a translucent blue vinyl LP manufactured by Physical Music Products in Nashville with lacquer cut by Scott Hull of Masterdisk.

I met Leo at a gig at The Bitter End. I was tuned up enough to chuckle at his drum references to the “Poison” fill, so we hit it off. Then I saw his band at their Ornithology residence. Eventually I asked him, “When are you going to record this?” One thing led to another, and I signed on to produce it.

We booked a day at GB’s Juke Joint in Queens, where we banged out 10 tracks in a manic 12-hour session. The players are such pros.

Then we spent some overnight sessions at Owen Mulholland’s studio editing and mixing. It was just a matter of getting the excellent performances to really shine and sound as great in the final stereo product as they do in person.

The name “earworm” came up after listening to the music enough times we couldn’t get it out of our heads. We then got this idea for something with gummy worms for the front cover. We hired Xavier Kim to come snap some photos of handfuls of gummy worms thrown by Leo’s girlfriend bouncing off Leo’s face.

It was impossible to resist bringing this album into the physical world with a real LP. The translucent swirl that evokes the gummy worm motif turned out beautifully.

Whether you listen on vinyl or digital, I’m sure you will bob your head to its tunes as their catchy melodies work their way into your ears. For sure, this album is a proud first entry in the nascent catalog of Future Imperfect.

20,000 Years & Still Going Strong

https://tunitemusic.com/post/20-000-years-still-going-strong-a-modern-rock-opera/

https://returnofrock.com/review-computer-nerd-20000-years-still-going-strong/

https://www.analoguetrash.com/blog/album-review-computer-nerd-20000-years-still-going-strong

https://plasticmag.co.uk/2026/02/computer-nerd-releases-prog-rock-opera/

https://cosmonautaradio.com.mx/2026/02/17/computer-nerd-20000-years-still-going-strong/

https://www.mysticsons.com/article/computer-nerd-20000-years-still-going-strong

https://lacaverna.net/de-opera-rock-a-black-metal-introspectivo/

earworm (2025)

https://tunitemusic.com/post/earworm-by-yuchtet-a-chordless-masterclass/

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/news/yuchtets-debut-album-earworm-is-a-modern-big-band-jazz-statement-worth-hearing/