Chicago’s The Breathing Light have unveiled their new single, “Everybody Has a Face”, arriving less as a release and more as a tableau, carefully composed yet brimming with movement. Across their forthcoming album In the True World (Psychic Eye Records/Don’t Panic! Records), the band draw from punk’s urgency, orchestral sweep, trip-hop elegance, and shoegaze haze, weaving a body of work that is as expansive as it is fluid. Yet within this wide palette, “Everybody Has a Face” stands apart: a haunting dreampop reverie, somber and melancholic, lingering in shadow rather than fire. It is here that the band slow their restless genre shifts, choosing instead to dwell in fragility and dream-like suspension.
Drifting within the heart of a dreamlike vision, Everybody Has a Face opens with a wistful violin line, its tone shaded in nostalgia, before bells and chimes scatter like a sudden breeze. What begins in melancholy soon tilts toward playfulness, guiding the listener into a space at once tender, peculiar, and inviting. As the band note, the track can “embrace the soulful and lush qualities of Massive Attack or Curtis Mayfield.” Within its waltz rhythm lies both weight and lift, as if gravity itself were briefly negotiable. Hints of Radiohead and The Divine Comedy, and even Nick Drake also waft through, and an almost chamber-pop refinement is threaded into the song’s fabric.
The video, directed by Emi K., translates this mood into imagery. Kyle Ozero, in a painted mask, drifts through Chicago streets as if half-present, passing unnoticed among crowds and avenues. In the cemetery, his painted features meet the broken faces of statues, the fleeting against the permanent. The symbolism strikes clear: “putting on a face” or “saving face” may shield the self, but at the cost of eroding it.
Yet the film never sinks into heaviness. Instead, it contemplates visibility: what it means to be seen, to withhold, to move through a city’s endless rhythm as both participant and phantom. The song’s airy patience mirrors the images: it is less about conclusion than suspension, lingering in the space between.
Watch the video for “Everybody Has A Face” below:
The Breathing Light’s In the True World unfolds across thirteen tracks, from crowd-surging intensity to drifting reverie. The strength lies not in any grand gesture, but in how the band allows each track to breathe and settle into its own shape. The album suggests less a destination than a shifting horizon, where sound becomes a landscape of possibility; an abstract world that shimmers just beyond reach, waiting to be entered.
In The True World draws inspiration from a 1977 time capsule sent into space, and the music is influenced by the upbringing of The Breathing Light’s primary composer, guitarist, and singer, Kyle Ozero, who grew up in the South Suburbs of Chicago. “I wanted to write an album that was a response to the Voyager Golden Records,” says Ozero. “The world sent those albums into the void, and this is my response from the void, from the place that people have forgotten and overlooked—It just so happens I grew up there. The void is ‘flyover’ country in a majority black suburb, but I’m here, and my music matters.”
Listen to Everybody Has A Face below and pre-order In The True World here.
The Breathing Light has released three previous albums: The Breathing Light (2013), Give Up (2015), and Cold Static World (2018), as well as one EP, Love Buss Down (2022), on Don’t Panic Records. They have toured the US since 2017, sharing stages with Death (Detroit) in 2019, performing at The Secret History of Black Punk Festival in NYC, 2023, and touring California in 2025. They plan to tour the US and the UK in 2026.
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