Kayo Dot is less a band than a twenty-year act of radical composition. Led by composer and multi-instrumentalist Toby Driver, the project has evolved through ten full-length albums, each one a rupture and a reinvention. Since its founding in 2003, Kayo Dot has functioned as a mutable vessel for Driver’s search for form, intensity, and transformation—its output spanning chamber-metal, spectral jazz, gothic synthscapes, and genreless music that critics have struggled to define but which has left deep marks on underground music culture. Working closely with librettist and conceptualist Jason Byron, the band’s work blends philosophical themes, mythic architecture, and violent emotionality into what amounts to a long-form, evolving autobiography—a sonic document of the artist haunted by his own past. What began with Choirs of the Eye—an ambitious debut fusing black metal, modern composition, and chamber instrumentation on John Zorn’s Tzadik label—would go on to influence a generation of experimental musicians. Each successive record broke cleanly from its predecessor: Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue collapsed into chaos; Blue Lambency Downward turned inward toward spectral melancholy; Coffins on Io reveled in neon-lit retro-futurism; Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike summoned a doomy grandeur unlike anything before it. The connective tissue between them was always Driver’s meticulous approach to form and sonic space, and Byron’s obsessive lyricism—personal, allegorical, and deeply imagistic. Now, in 2025, Kayo Dot prepares to release Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason, an album created to mark the project’s twentieth anniversary but designed to undermine the very idea of legacy. The new work reunites original members and introduces new collaborators, reworking the past as a kind of hauntological feedback loop. Custom-built microtonal organs and guitars, tuned just outside standard intonation, subtly distort familiar sounds into something strange and otherworldly, while Byron’s texts return to themes of memory, trauma, and the search for meaning through symbolic patterns. Driver has called the new style "liminal metal"—a sound rooted in thresholds and drift, music that appears to be emerging from and collapsing into its own archive. Kayo Dot has never courted mainstream attention, but its audience—ranging from avant-garde composers to black metal obsessives—recognizes the band’s discography as a vital part of the experimental canon. Its live shows are famously unpredictable, often reconfiguring the material into new forms. Around Kayo Dot spirals a wider orbit of creative output: Driver’s solo work (Madonnawhore, They Are the Shield, Raven, I Know That You Can Give Me Anything), his dark free-jazz project Bloodmist, the electroacoustic group Tartar Lamb, his roles in Extra Life and Secret Chiefs 3—all of which feed into Kayo Dot’s dense, shifting sonic ecology. Kayo Dot’s twenty-year journey reads less like a band bio and more like the evolving output of a composer who has treated the project as a living archive. With Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason, the group confronts its own past and turns it into a compositional engine—a ghost story about the weight of influence and the impossibility of starting over. As Driver and Byron reassemble old and new elements into an uncanny new structure, Kayo Dot invites its listeners into a space where memory, loss, and invention become indistinguishable

Straya’s new album, Sobereyed, is a 57-minute work that represents two years of writing and growth. One might be inclined to label it progressive rock, “experimental,” or even post-metal—but it’s more apt to describe the contents: There are bursts of black metal and abrupt cornet solos; abrasive synthesizers and a 28-guitar choir; extended ambient and death metal sections; expressionistic aphorisms at a near whisper and confessional, blistering screams. Careful arrangements and meditative pace permeate the compositions, reflecting the Minneapolis group’s tendency to pull from disparate influences. The track “Tongue Is Nothing,” for example, is an emulation of Gaelic psalm singing, while “Made Lighter” was conceived as a nod to Brian Eno. Sobereyed is the second full-length from Straya. It marks a major stylistic shift from 2015’s Healthy Steps, which spawned multiple tours and was a Star Tribune critics’ choice for the year. After two years of crafting Sobereyed, Straya is back with its best work to date and first release with Los Angeles-based label Chain Letter Collective.

Ben, Tyler, Kayhan, and Korty. From Chicago.