Take my silence from me
Used to be your body
Now I’m just nobody…
From the first seconds of 62 Dead Balloons, it’s clear that Australian A Friend For Frank and Arizona’s calQtek have stepped into a room where nothing is cushioned and every feeling scrapes the paint. The project name alone hints at resignation wrapped in a grin, but the music pushes further: trembling, tense, and strangely tender.
What began as a simple request for “a song or two” between two long-time online collaborators quickly turned into a full-blown band. A Friend For Frank (AFFF), who has spent nearly three decades making vulnerable, emotionally heavy hip hop as Thorts, reached out to calQtek at a breaking point in his life. He needed somewhere to put the words he couldn’t carry anymore. “It started with one song, then another, then this song, ‘62 Dead Balloons,’” he recalls. “Once we made that song, we knew we had something special and decided to work on a project together.”
For calQtek — a producer, writer, and multimedia artist whose roots trace back to the experimental sci-fi project geppettoGESTAPO and the deeply conceptual The Vignette Marionettes and Dimension of Dreams — the partnership arrived at just the right kind of chaos. “We did the whole record over a month, swapping tracks,” he says. “I didn’t get any sleep during the initial sessions… it was madness but we were on this roll.” From there, the pair realised this was not just another collaboration, but the start of a group that needed its own name, its own language, and its own emotional landscape.
That name came from a particularly grim day. AFFF was smoking too much, not eating, and hardly sleeping. “One day I worked out that I had smoked 62 cigarettes in one day and thought to myself, ‘my lungs must be like dead balloons,’” he explains. With 99 Red Balloons floating somewhere in the back of his mind, “62 Dead Balloons” first surfaced as a song title — then as the name for the entire project. For calQtek, the phrase took on an even wider symbolism: mortality, self-destruction, and the slow deflation that comes with trying to outrun your own pain.
Both artists arrived here carrying heavy baggage. AFFF describes this as the hardest, most challenging time he has ever experienced: “I was at rock bottom, alone and extremely traumatised.” Some of the songs written in that state were so raw that he ultimately scrapped them because he couldn’t bear to hear them again. For his part, calQtek was circling his own bottom — wrestling with addiction and burnout — and found that channelling his energy into these songs was a way back to himself.
The video for 62 Dead Balloons, filmed by AFFF’s wife and long-time collaborator, photographer Kady Somerville, and directed and edited by A Friend For Frank himself, plays like a fevered confession delivered straight into the bark and undergrowth. A Friend For Frank staggers through the woods, face crowding the frame, speaking directly to the camera as if it’s the only witness left on earth. The edits slash and scatter…jumps, jolts, brief blurs of green and grit, mirroring the emotional freefall of the song itself. It’s a raw, restless dispatch, the kind of clip that feels discovered rather than filmed, as though the artist wandered into the trees with a burden too heavy to carry and decided to unload it on whatever lens would listen.
Watch the video below:
Although neither artist consciously set out to make a darkwave or post-punk track, the song’s palette of shadowed synths and low-registered vocals made the lineage impossible to ignore. AFFF explains, “I had no influences at all when writing this… my friends said it reminded them of goth, synth pop, post punk. That’s when I started listening to Lebanon Hanover, The Cure, The Sound, Joy Division, Depeche Mode. This was a whole new world for me — and now it’s all I’ve been listening to for the last 12 months.” For calQtek, those textures were already his natural vocabulary. “It’s probably a mix of ‘Pretty Hate Machine’-era NIN musically and Joy Division vocally,” he says. “When I first heard Trent or early Skinny Puppy, I gravitated toward the arpeggiated synths and the darkness. That’s the energy I’m looking to create with 62 Dead Balloons.” As they kept exchanging ideas, their shared influences expanded further — VNV Nation, Bauhaus, KMFDM, Nation of Language, and even obscure Eastern European coldwave artists. “AFFF is an archaeologist,” CalQtek laughs. “He digs and finds things I didn’t even know existed. Apparently, I didn’t know as much as I thought.”
Looking ahead, 62 Dead Balloons is already operating like a fully formed band rather than a tentative side project. Their debut album, Where Shadows Find Their Grace, is slated for release on April 11, 2026, and is currently being mixed and mastered by Christopher John Brown (Life Cult). Four more singles and videos will follow in quick succession, arriving on 12/12, 1/1, 2/2, and 3/3, each one unfurling another facet of the duo’s grief-stricken, genre-fluid world.
By the time that first album surfaces, they will be nearly finished with their second. “I have one more instrumental to write out of the twelve already written for the next record,” says calQtek. Physical formats are firmly on their wish list — tape, vinyl, anything that gives these songs a life beyond the timeline scroll.
Visually, they plan to keep things as close to home as the songs themselves. AFFF loves making videos with his wife and son, leaning into DIY setups, tripods, and intuition over big concepts. Live performance remains a more complicated frontier: AFFF, who is on the autism spectrum and hasn’t performed since 2013, is cautiously considering a return to the stage in Perth. If and when it happens, it will be on his terms. “I really want to work on this in the future and start performing again,” he says. “I’m hoping I can start doing shows next year.”
At the core of 62 Dead Balloons is a shared understanding of why music still matters — not as industry, not as commodity, but as a lifeline. AFFF puts it bluntly: “Without music life is meaningless.” His most vulnerable truth in this project is equally direct: “Don’t be silent. Express yourself. Don’t be scared to show who you really are… ask for help when you need it. Life is too short, and we only have one shot at this. Don’t waste it. Live.”
For calQtek, the mission is to “self-reflect relentlessly and make every mistake beautiful.” Together, they describe 62 Dead Balloons as “genre fluid,” unbound by tradition and unified instead by feeling. Each song stands alone; each track is a new attempt at turning the worst possible days into something that looks, if not like hope, then at least like proof that someone else has been there too.
Now, with Where Shadows Find Their Grace on the horizon, a second record already in motion, and an unflinching commitment to making the uncomfortable bearable through song, 62 Dead Balloons feels less like reinvention and more like revelation.
In the meantime, find 62 Dead Balloons‘ enponymous debut single on Bandcamp below:
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