Take us to nirvana, Celestial cosmonaut
Teach us Galactic truth
Looking into a night sky, it is easy to see how the stars became a place to put our questions. We draw figures between distant points of light, imagine gods moving among them, and wonder whether someone out there might know more about our lives than we do. The celestial visitors of alien mythology inherit that mixture of curiosity and longing: they may bring knowledge, promise deliverance, or announce that our time has run out. Much depends on which message we are willing to believe.
That primeval appetite for revelation runs through They Are Here, the new single from Rose Haze, the project of Los Angeles songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Kate Ramsey. Accompanied by an animated video from Japhy Riddle, the song sends ethereal goth, shoegaze, and psychedelia into a sky crowded with competing promises of salvation.
A rushing surge gives way to a deep post-punk bassline and drums that shudder with slow tension. Heavy guitar presses into the spaces around them, while a buzzing synth melody appears and recedes like small lights crossing the dark. Ramsey’s cool, airborne vocals suggest The Shroud and the more spectral reaches of the Projekt Records catalogue, carrying a melody whose beauty makes the unfolding catastrophe all the more unsettling.
As the arrangement expands, the guitars approach the luxuriant heights of Cocteau Twins and the gothic grandeur of Faith and the Muse. They shiver and crash, at moments acquiring the reedy, massed cry of bagpipes. The bass keeps a firm foothold beneath all that upward movement, giving the song a physical weight equal to its celestial ambitions.
Ramsey’s lyrics gather burning forests, the falling Wormwood star, a drying Euphrates, and creatures assembled from horses, locusts, and scorpions. Biblical catastrophe becomes entangled with bodily possession and appeals to a “Celestial cosmonaut.” The mingling of divine visitation and alien arrival evokes the ancient-astronaut speculation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, with sacred imagery reconsidered as possible extraterrestrial contact. Yet the early warning, “False prophets seduce the weak,” hangs over every promised revelation. Each return of “Do you believe?” tests the distance between wanting an answer and trusting whoever offers one.
Riddle gives this uncertainty a wonderfully strange visual form. Pale, chalk-like contours turn bodies, beasts, spacecraft, and machinery into moving constellations. A hooded preacher addresses a congregation of sheep; screens repeat his image, and disembodied lips multiply across the darkness. Horsemen rise through a violet sky while forests burn below. The imagery suggests a universe in which belief travels through broadcasts, symbols, and spectacles, with every apparent revelation raising another question about who controls the picture.
Those expressive outlines recall Emily Hubley’s animation for The Origin of Love in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, where drawn figures give an ancient myth about human longing an immediate emotional life. Riddle’s figures likewise seem to belong to a story being written across the heavens. Their spare forms make the immense scale approachable, allowing the viewer to follow a gesture or a face through the surrounding cosmic machinery.
Eventually, the darkness opens onto a pastel heaven of clouds, floating crystals, and sheep. Its sweetness proves unstable: the scene resolves into a wireframe image on an old computer monitor, which goes blank. “The simulation has come to an end,” Ramsey sings. After all those appeals to higher powers, the film leaves us looking at the apparatus that contained their universe.
The closing dedication brings the film back to a deeply personal loss. They Are Here features the late guitarist Ruben Gonzales, Ramsey’s close collaborator, who died in 2024. His guitar parts date to the earliest sessions for the forthcoming album, which Ramsey finished alone after his death. The force of his playing gives this vast journey an intimate center: within its visions of endings and escape, the recording preserves the work they began together.
Watch the video for They Are Here below:
They Are Here is the lead single from Rose Haze’s forthcoming album, A Whole Lot of Nothing for No One, out January 31, 2027. Her first full-length album in five years is available to pre-order here. In the meantime, listen to They Are Here below:
Born in Ohio, Ramsey plays piano, synth, guitar, harp, bass, and flute. She recorded and performed her first two albums with Lisa Bella Donna, later traveling through Europe and Kaua’i before moving to California in 2019, where she met Gonzales. Her live performances make room for improvisation and changing instrumental combinations, allowing the songs to shift shape from one set to the next.
Riddle is an animator and musician whose interests in science, mathematics, and computer engineering inform his visual work.
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