KAYO DOT unveilnew video single’Closet Door in the Room Where She Died’

KAYO DOT unveil new video single
‘Closet Door in the Room Where She Died‘
from forthcoming album
“Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason“

KAYO DOT release the epic-length video single ‘Closet Door in the Room Where She Died‘ taken from their forthcoming new album “Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason“, which is scheduled for release on August 1, 2025.

KAYO DOT comment: “Song and video ‘Closet Door in the Room Where She Died’ meditate on the theme of haunting, not just in the supernatural sense but in the way the past imprints itself on space”, mastermind Toby Driver explains. “The ghost here is not a mere specter but a residue, an event that has left its mark on the house, on the walls, on the very air. The house itself is alive with memories, trapped in a state of suspended time, an echo that will not fade. The ghost watches, trapped in the mirror, unable to escape the house it once inhabited. This ghost is not a solitary figure but part of a larger, more insidious force – the trauma of a past that will not be exorcised. And, like the world we live in, the house is inhabited by the past, the present, and the inescapable blur between them. The music builds on this sense of entrapment and distance. The foundation of microtonal organs, layers of clarinets, and violins creates a dense, suffocating atmosphere, reminiscent of György Ligeti’s work – where dissonant beauty holds us in place. There is no percussion here, no steady rhythm to anchor us. The long, drawn-out drones and expansive, reverb-heavy orchestration deepen the sense of isolation, as if we’re trapped in a space where time doesn’t move forward, but instead spirals inward. The house, like the world, becomes a place where past and present collide in an unresolvable tension, leaving us with nothing but the ghostly remnants of what once was.”

Credit
Video by Toby Driver

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.

Band: Kayo DotAlbum title: Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason
Style: Liminal metal
Release date: August 1, 2025
Label: Prophecy Productions
Review impact date: July 1, 2025

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

Links
http://kayodot.net
www.facebook.com/kayodotofficial
www.instagram.com/kayodotofficial

Shop: 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.