The Rocket Summer brainchild, Bryce Avary has announced his new album, SHADOWKASTERS, due out May 12th. The album is available for pre-save digitally and pre-order physically now on 180 Gram Black Vinyl, Eco Mix Mystery Color Vinyl, CD, and Glow In The Dark Cassette tapes, alongside pin sets hoodies and shirts. The album announcement follows the release of previous singles, “M4U,” and “Stuck Inside Your Light”, with the remaining songs (including the upcoming single, “Sing At The Top,” out this Friday) diving deeper into the synth-enriched waters he waded in on his most recent albums and swims effortlessly into darker, keyboard-driven and affected guitar depths.
“I let myself tap in and reset with this one creatively,” explains Avary. “I felt this tangible tug to tap into the long inherent but sonically neglected places of my heart and simply begin exhaling from there. What happened was a creative release and outflow that I’ve never really had before.”
“I had begun writing fictional stories as a creative exercise,” explains Avary. “I started to make what I referred to as ‘tiny soundtracks’ to these unreleased films in my mind. Ultimately that process opened long inherent but sonically neglected places of the soul and, from there, I began to exhale. I kept drawing from that well to the point where there was a hard drive full of all of these unique songs with this special energy. I feel like I went through the wardrobe into Narnia and returned with this album.”
The tone of SHADOWKASTERS evokes the sounds one might envision within the walls of electronic dance clubs, UK dance punk halls, and R&B-thumping venues, but with a mix and filtering unique to Avary’s creative lens, as inventive and penetrating amongst his evolving discography.
There are the slow synth stutters and freakouts over Avary’s soaring vocals on “Eyes 2 The Skies,” as well as the sitar-infused with blasts of intergalactic electronica on “Do You See Your Dreamscapes In Your Dreams Before The Dreams Escape When The Sun Beams.” “Disco In Circles” transforms turntable screeches turned into a percussive, eerie backdrop over Avary’s placid singing. Meanwhile, “Off The Hinge” features a breezy piano intro, before evolving into a blast beats tinged gritty punk wail.
“A lot of this album has been done for quite some time and was made during the isolation period of the pandemic,” says Avary. “So it’s almost like a compilation album of songs recorded over a couple of years that I felt made sense together in a sequence. I’ve always played all of the instruments on Rocket Summer albums. Still, there was a different energy that fueled many of these songs that came from seeking joy by way of discovering, manipulating, and getting lost in new sounds because I was simply alone for so much of it. It is by far the most instrumentally nuanced album I’ve ever made.”