PRINCE DADDY & THE HYENA have shared their brand new song ‘The Prototype of the Ultimate Lifeform’ from their highly-anticipated new album Cosmic Thrill Seekers, out 28th June 2019.
It’s the first the band have shared from the second act of the record, The Brain. A distinctive tonal shift occurs here as front-person Kory Gregory’s mental state rotates and jumps from it’s previous stage, The Heart. Here the band enter a new phases of self-depreciation, where paranoia looms and our protagonist chillingly reflects inward with aversion.
“nothing in my brain would impress you /
sit and think all day like a recluse /
just like a recluse /
YR SO PATHETHIC!”
Sonically, it starts lighter than most of the tracks, but quickly builds in sync with Kory’s narrative revelations. The video for the song features never-before-seen footage from the making of Cosmic Thrill Seekers. Filmed in February at PonderRosa Studios in Lafayette, NJ. The video was shot by Counter Intuitive Records’ Jake Sulzer and does an expert-level job at capturing what went into the making of such an ambitious record.But it’s still it’s PRINCE DADDY & THE HYENA we’re talking about here, so in between shots of these intense moments are plenty of antics, including a sriracha-drinking contest between Sulzer and CTS producer Nick Dardaris (AKA beloved pal and Albany scene comrade Scoops), cameos from longtime Prince Daddy family Kississippi, Just Friends, Strange Ranger, Luis , and so much more.
Cosmic Thrill Seekers, the new record from Albany punk rock band PRINCE DADDY & THE HYENA, is many things. It is an odyssey of epic, The Monitor-esque proportions, a great, galloping sonic roadtrip across space and time and Albany, boomeranging around a horn of punk, pop, indie, garage rock, and orchestral, Queen-style arrangements and theatrics; it is an exploration of the fall-out after an acid trip, manic self-destruction, bottoming-out and recovering, and then slipping again; it is a candid, acute documentation of front person Kory Gregory’s cyclical mental health states as told through three acts and 14 songs/chapters; it is an existential presentation of eternal return theory, a victory via surrender to impermanence; and perhaps most of all, it is about Dorothy Gale and The Wizard Of Oz.
There are three acts in Cosmic Thrill Seekers, each exploring a stage in Gregory’s mental health. “I remember watching the Wizard of Oz one time, and noticing some weird kind of parallels between the cyclical nature of my mental health and that movie,” he says. “My mental health rotates and jumps from one stage to the next, and then repeats itself.” The closing moments of Cosmic Thrill Seekers reflect this, as the outro to the last track, “The Wacky Misadventures of the Passenger,” morphs into the first muted notes of opener “I Lost My Life.”