I’m just an animal
Can’t get this feeling through my skull
The past got sanitized
Nothing’s moving behind my eyes
Before Carcosa seeped into the murky depths of True Detective’s swampland, The King in Yellow was already whispering through the very cracks of weird fiction. Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 collection, a mesmerizing blend of decadent theater and psychological unraveling, leaves behind a haunting trail of fragmented horror. Tucked away within its pages lies a cursed play that unmoors all who dare to read it. The dread it evokes is subtle, delayed, and insidiously infectious. H.P. Lovecraft devoured its essence, drawing its cosmic dread and distorted reality into the tapestry of his own mythos. While Chambers never constructed a universe as expansive as Lovecraft’s, he achieved something far stranger: he infused his tales with an atmosphere laden with suggestion and implication. The King in Yellow captures the exquisite disintegration of the mind before it grasps meaning. It lingers as a literary phantom—unfinished, unknowable, and hauntingly elegant.
From the rust-cracked outskirts of Kingston, NY, King In Yellow lurches forth like a fever dream gone grey: monochrome, maudlin, magnificent. Longtime co-conspirators Kyle McDonough and Nick Vining steer the project through shoegaze fog, noise-rock squall, and the glassy-eyed gloom of new wave. It’s rock and roll warped by reflection, soaked in sorrow, then throttled with reverb.
Dream Weapon, the lead single from their forthcoming EP All Is Loneliness, plays like a memory rotting at the edges. It rattles with the weight of something missed…a train fading into twilight, never to return. Feedback coils around the corners, guitars melt into sirens, and the vocal, half howled and half unravelled in the vein of Pixies’ Black Francis, mourns fragmented selves and half-seen ghosts. This is the noise that memory makes when it won’t stay buried; a funeral dirge for who we thought we were, sung in ash and static.
“Dream Weapon is about delusion; the feeling that the world you inhabit is meaningless,” says the band.
The band’s intellect is evident in their poetic lyrics that wander through alleyways of disconnection and dread, tracing a soul unmoored; adrift between subway silences and the dim glow of second-floor windows. Even Cathy’s Clown gets a nod, not as a joke but a gesture of reverence: the Everly Brothers’ sorrowful croon recast as the original sadboy anthem, a smirk laced with sting. Dream Weapon captures the slow unraveling of identity like a leak in the ceiling—persistent, quiet, inescapable. This is music for those pacing at 3 a.m. with ghosts in their headphones.
Enjoy the lo-fi psychedelia from the band’s DIY video for the track below:
Listen to Dream Weapon below and order the single here:
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