25/12/2025
Released on August 1, 2025: "Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason" by US avant-garde metal group Kayo Dot.
Listen/order: https://spkr.store/collections/kayo-dot
On their eleventh regular studio album, "Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason", conceptual and experimental artists KAYO DOT commemorate the 20th anniversary of "Choirs of the Eye" by reuniting the original line-up. This bold musical statement from the ever-changing composer and mastermind Toby Driver marks both a return and a progression from the band's seminal debut by revisiting the compositional practices that defined it while pushing forward into uncharted territory. Rejecting traditional rock structures and the more predictable contours of metal, "Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason" shapes a sound that feels familiar and alien at once, where custom-designed microtonal organs and guitars weave an effort to reconcile the impossible tension between past and future. Moving away from the typical emphasis on low-end frequencies, it floats instead in the upper spectrum, where the textures become more fragile, more intimate, and more abrasive and terrifying. This KAYO DOT album is also haunted by the ghost of a future to come: the spectre of AI-generated creativity. The increasing presence of artificial composition, predictive modelling, and algorithmic aesthetics casts a long shadow over all creative work today, which caused Driver to write in ways that resist prediction, to compose music that does not reveal itself to pattern recognition. Much of the album is an effort to move against the grain of legibility, to make something that slips from the grasp of systems designed to anticipate us.
