Kayo Dot - Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason
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 process of creation revealed a new form of music that KAYO DOT came to call liminal metal – a sound that inhabits the atmosphere of threshold spaces, where time feels stretched and the boundaries between realities begin to erode. It's a music of flickering states, caught between what is, what was, and what could have been. In that tension, the album becomes an expression of the hauntological crisis of our times: a cultural and social moment in which the future has grown indistinct, and the present is swollen with the ghosts of a past that will not release its grip. A malfunction in which the past won't stay buried and the new arrives already pre-formatted by old frameworks. Metal, perhaps more than any other genre, reveals this condition most clearly – trapped in cycles of self-reference, entranced by its own legacy, hungry for newness but tethered to myth.

But hauntology is not only about the past. It is also the intrusion of futures that have not yet happened, but whose shadows shape the present. This KAYO DOT album is haunted by one such future: 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. Toby Driver writes: "I felt this shadow pressing on me throughout the writing process. The threat wasn't just technological – it was metaphysical. It became even more important 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. In this way, the music becomes a kind of countermeasure – a way of preserving the unpredictability, opacity, and grief of human creation."

The ghosts in this album don't just inhabit the lyrics, where first-person voices speak from beyond death – they also permeate the form and texture of the music itself. They live in the dissonances, the silences, the stretched structures, the tones that feel like echoes of something that never quite arrived. The emotional world here isn’t built on conclusion, but on proximity, recurrence, and the strange intimacy of being half-remembered. Across these songs, lingering beneath the surface is a recurring sense that the dead are still needed by the living. That need is not a comfort. It signals a kind of entrapment, a symptom of a cultural condition in which we can't let go, and can't really move forward either. This album doesn't attempt to resolve that condition. It sits with it, listens, and makes it audible.

After the split of much loved MAUDLIN OF THE WELL, charismatic frontman Toby Driver formed the avant-garde music project KAYO DOT as a new outlet for his burgeoning creativity in 2003. The multi-instrumentalist and singer remains the only absolute constant in this band, although there are frequent lyrical contributions from Jason Byron, even at times when the latter was out of the group, throughout the extensive discography. In the following 20 years, KAYO DOT released an impressive number of full-lengths, EPs, splits, and live recordings that are all marked by considerable stylistic differences and a wide array of instrumentation that included guitars, bass, drums, vibraphone, violin, synthesizers, flutes, clarinets and saxophone.

Band: Kayo Dot
Album title: Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason
Style: Liminal metal
Release date: August 1, 2025
Label: Prophecy Productions
Review impact date: July 1, 2025

Tracklist
1. Mental Shed
2. Oracle by Severed Head
3. Closet Door in the Room Where She Died
4. Automatic Writing
5. Blind Creature of Slime

Line-up
Toby Driver guitar, voice, bass guitar, fretless bass, organ, synth, clarinet, flute, drums & other percussion
Jason Byron voice
Sam Gutterman drums, vibraphone, other percussion
Terran Olson clarinet, flute, baritone saxophone, alto saxophone, Rhodes piano
Greg Massi guitar
Matthew Serra guitar
Timba Harris violin, viola, trumpet