Kayo Dot are now revealing the video single ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ taken from their forthcoming new album “Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason”, which is scheduled for release on August 1, 2025.
Kayo Dot ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ taken from the album “Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason”: https://youtu.be/XfxButjf8Xs
Kayo Dot comment: “The song ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ is about prophecy, but not the clean, transcendent kind that we’ve been taught to expect”, mastermind Toby Driver reveals. “This is prophecy as defilement – a sacred voice ripped from the past and forced through a severed head – a voice no longer truly its own, but distorted, fragmented, bleeding into the present. It is a song that interrogates the ways in which manipulated versions of the past continue to invade the present, asserting themselves in violent ways. These voices might be real and they might speak some truths, but who, through the obscene fracture that brought them back, are we really listening to? And at what cost? Musically, ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ pulls us into that space of rupture. It is built on a large ensemble – guitars, drums, bass, strings, woodwinds, trumpet, and vocals – an orchestration that calls back to the earliest Kayo Dot works. The song is a perfect choice for a first single, as it celebrates our return to form while marking the passing of time since ‘Choirs of the Eye’. The music is expansive but controlled, allowing tension and release to breathe in real time. Its beauty is at odds with its plaintiveness, as aching melodies and delicate harmonies evoke a sense of loss and longing. The climaxes feel inevitable, yet somehow unexpected. In these moments, the music mirrors the emotional intensity of our most powerful moments, but also speaks to the underlying disquiet of the present – trapped between what was and what is yet to come.”
Video credits: Shot by Toby Driver / Arranged by Peter Hopkins Miller
Album 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
On their eleventh regular studio album, “Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason”, Kayo Dot commemorate the 20th anniversary of “Choirs of the Eye” by reuniting the original line-up. This bold musical statement from the ever-changing composer and mastermind Toby Driver marks both a return and a progression from the band’s seminal debut by revisiting the compositional practices that defined it while pushing forward into uncharted territory.
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.
Kayo Dot 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
Recording, mix & mastering: Toby Driver at Deciduous Murmur, Connecticut (US) / Artwork by Toby Driver / Layout by Łukasz Jaszak
Shop at http://lnk.spkr.media/kayodot-everyrock
Available formats: “Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason” is available as 36-page 2CD artbook, ltd. gatefold marbled black & white double-vinyl, gatefold black double-vinyl, and as a Digipak CD.