Nashville, TN — Mar. 26, 2025 — Nyctophiliac is a title before it's anything else — a word for someone who's drawn to the dark, not scared of it — and the campaign that announced it never once broke character to explain that. Three posts went up in the weeks before the album arrived on February 28, and none of them read like promotion. They read like pages out of something. This recap runs a few weeks past the usual turnaround — deliberately, to wait for the second of the album's two videos to actually exist.
First: "The metamorphosis was complete. The darkness had changed him, embraced him. He was better, He was darker..." (view the post) Then the line that would become the album's own tagline, half-struck-through like a redaction: "Stay away from the l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ !" (view the post) Somewhere in the same stretch, a third post skipped his own words entirely for someone else's — Mark Twain, of all people: "Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody" (view the post). Three posts, zero explanation, and by the time the record dropped the thesis had already been said for him.
Two singles, two videos
"Serp" carries the record's sharpest visual identity — thermal-camera pinks and acid yellows dripping off hand-brushed lettering, a datamoshed corridor of glass-fronted lockers lit blood-red from within. Its video didn't land with the rest of the album; it followed three weeks later, on March 19. The promo reel that came with it didn't dress the wait up much either: "I'll sip myself to death but, I'll never die thirsty." Co-produced by @shotbyclaudius, closed out with the now-familiar "The VOID cannot be contained!" (view the reel) That partnership didn't end with the original cut, either — @shotbyclaudius came back later with an unreleased alternate cut of "Serp," running the same footage through a heavier glitch pipeline of VHS tracking errors and chromatic aberration, now hosted on the site's collab page.
"Sunny-D" is the record's odd swerve — a video shot like a found VHS tape, complete with a fake camcorder HUD (battery percentage, a countdown, katakana readouts) over the sight of Alpha The Wolf in a big-box store aisle, arms full of gallon jugs of the orange drink the song is named for. It's a lighter beat than most of the album around it, and the video leans all the way into that, treating a grocery run like found footage from another decade.
What "Nyctophiliac" means
Nine tracks — Holy Drip, Haneda Airport, Dirty, Ueonowaisayn, Serp, You and Me, Sunny D, Session, Infinity — and a mascot to match: a horned, black-furred wolf creature with one glowing red eye, standing in for the record the way the howling logo stood in for Forlorn. Where the debut sat in isolation and heartbreak, Nyctophiliac reframes the same artist as something closer to a character who's already crossed over — better for the darkness, not despite it. The rap and hip-hop lane is a clean break from Forlorn's trap-soul, and it's the lane the two singles both work inside of, "Serp" running cold and menacing, "Sunny-D" running strange and almost funny, both still under the same tagline running through the whole campaign.
Nyctophiliac is out now on all platforms, both official videos live on YouTube.
READ THE ANNOUNCEMENT | STREAM HERE
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