Introducing "The Lonely Atom"
🪞🪞⚛️🪞🪞 The new Lamniformes album arrives March 29th 🪞🪞⚛️🪞🪞
It is my great pleasure to announce my new album The Lonely Atom. The Lonely Atom will be available digitally and on cassette on March in a joint release between Furious Hooves and People | Places Records. You can pre-order the digital version of the album on my bandcamp, but I’d encourage you to pre-order the cassette from People | Places because the cassettes are beautiful and physical media is cool.
The Lonely Atom was coproduced with Jack Greenleaf, who also mixed the album, engineered some of the tracking and played guitar on a couple songs. It was mastered by Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering Service. Joseph Klomes designed the art, and Richard Gin shot the album’s photography.
I love this album and I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever worked on. But don’t just take my word for it. Take the word of writer and former Kerrang! & The Pit editor Cat Costa-Jones! Here’s what Cat wrote about The Lonely Atom:
Lamniformes, the solo songwriting project created by Brooklyn-based musician Ian Cory, serves as a sonic manifestation of the anxious ruminations in its creator's mind. As such, it has grown and evolved alongside the human at the helm, taking on different life forms and genres from post-rock to hardcore and exploring themes ranging from self-hatred to The Myth of Sisyphus since the project began in 2011. But it seems as though the last decade-plus has merely been a warmup for Cory, whose songwriting and general artistic approach has reached its height in 2023, on Lamniformes' second full-length record, The Lonely Atom: an incisive, moving, mesmerizingly catchy heavy alternative rock concept album about the isolation of modern life, the fractured projections of the self that exist outside of us in digitally mediated spaces, and the universally-felt desperation for real connection in an increasingly atomized world.
The Lonely Atom's concept came to Cory through a series of eerie occurrences he experienced that made him consider the ways humans connect with one another, and in turn, the bizarre and often insidious ways modern technology has distorted or even prevented one of our most fundamental needs as a species. Some of these experiences were lighthearted on the surface, like the time he heard a song by his friend Frankie Cosmos playing in a coffee shop and was struck by the peculiarity of hearing a time capsule of her voice completely outside of her real-life existence -- an idea which he explores through metaphors of fossilized insects and Annihilation-style doppelgängers on the track "In Amber." Or a visit to the Calgary Tower in Canada long ago referenced in the title track, wherein he saw a reflection of himself poetically superimposed onto the cityscape before him, inspiring a fascination with mirrors and other reflective surfaces. This fascination has since taken on a deeper meaning: To Cory, mirrors and windows represent an opportunity to see a version of the self that isn't real, much like the images we project onto social media or encapsulate in various art forms, free to take on lives of their own. For better or worse.
But The Lonely Atom's central theme was also born of a few profoundly chilling occurrences: The first and arguably most sobering experience that gave way to record was back in 2017: While half-heartedly scrolling through Facebook on the subway home from work one day, he discovered that an acquaintance -- someone he'd met a handful of times in the early 2000s, but had only interacted with online for a decade or more -- had died. A bizarre sensation came over him as he looked at her profile, a strange digital simulacrum of what she had chosen to share with the world over the years, and considered the multimedia ghosts we leave behind in death. He also wondered if he would have even heard about her death if not for their lingering, impersonal online connection. Deeply unnerved, he thought, “I don't want to die on the Internet. I want to die in real life.” This experience inspired the poppy yet gravely heavy track "In Case You Missed It," which pointedly evaluates the habit of spending so much of our time trying to reflect reality that we miss out on the reality right in front of us -- or in some cases, squander our last chances to spend time with people in person. The song has weighty riffs and a foreboding buildup, so Cory contrasted the darkness with backup vocals in the style of a Motown-esque girl group. He called upon his friend (and Bellows bandmate) Montana Elliot as well as Boston musician Emily Reo to sing the upbeat yet disturbing chorus, "ICYMI, I'm not alive."
In a heartbreaking turn of events, Elliot passed away suddenly and unexpectedly after recording that vocal part, sending a wave of intense grief through Cory’s inner circle of friends and fellow musicians. To make the situation even more eerie, she had left behind an impossibly chilling, disembodied reminder of the very thing the song warns about -- forever immortalized in a voice that no longer exists in the real world. The Lonely Atom is dedicated to her.
Though these songs simmered in Cory's mind back in 2017, he finalized the tracks and scheduled studio time for April 2020 with the intention of recording most of the parts himself. Obviously, those plans were thwarted by the onset of the pandemic, and without access to a studio space in his own house he was forced to reimagine the structure of the project. Considering the album's theme of overcoming setbacks to connect with other people, and finding himself in a time when people were more isolated and in need of connection than ever, Cory decided to walk the walk and turn the album into a group effort, with various people recording little parts and sending them to him one by one. He assembled a crew of wildly talented musicians, including dear friends and local acquaintances alike, whose schedules had all been cleared as a result of COVID, all of whom reacted to the demos with earnest excitement.
The full lineup of "The Lonely Atom Family Band" is detailed below, but the "starting lineup," so to speak, includes producer Jack Greenleaf (Sharpless, Bellows, Gabby’s World), guitarist Siddhu Anadalingham (Semaphore), guitarist AJ Santillan (Massa Nera), bassist/keyboardist Frank Meadows (Bellows), and drummer Seth Engel (Options, Nnamdi, Water From Your Eyes).
While Cory wrote former Lamniformes records with his post rock-loving 17-year-old self in mind, The Lonely Atom was specifically written for his inner 13-year-old. He means this in two ways: Musically, he spent a lot of time revisiting the exquisitely written yet emotionally harrowing type of pop songs found on records he loved at that time, like Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, Radiohead's Hail To The Thief, and Linkin Park's Meteora. But on another level, he also wanted to honor the version of himself that existed then: a lonely, isolated young teen who was beginning to feel angry and distrustful of the world; who found solace in emotional music and was profoundly moved by The Matrix; who could have fallen down a sinister rabbit hole if he hadn't ultimately found a way to connect. The truth is, that version of him turned out to be right about the world – but this time around, he understands the way forward.
Give The Lonely Atom a listen and you might just find your own way, too.
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Wow, thanks Cat! As she alluded to the album’s full list of credits are below. If you’ve followed along with my newsletters and podcasts over the last few years I imagine a number of these names will be familiar to you. Everyone killed it under extremely strange circumstances and I’m proud of what we made together.
The Lonely Atom’s Family Band Is:
Siddhu Anadalingham - Guitar
Ella Boissonnault - Backing Vocals
Emmett Ceglia - Drums
Montana Elliot - Backing Vocals
Seth Engel - Drums
Jack Greenleaf - Guitar, Modular Synthesis
Adam Holmes - Crotales, Vibraphone, Sound Design
Joseph Hurtado - Backing Vocals
Oliver Kalb - Acoustic Guitar, Backing Vocals
Michael Lambert - Guitar Solo
Parker Langvardt - Bass Effects
Anna McClellen - Backing Vocals
Frank Meadows - Bass, Double Bass, Rhodes, DX7, Juno, Nord
Daniel Müller - Hammered Dulcimer
Emily Reo - Backing Vocals, Vocoder
AJ Santillan - Guitar
Felix Walworth - Moog Rogue, Backing Vocals
James Wilcox - Drum Programming
And here’s the track list:
Familiar
In Case You Missed It
In Amber
A Hair Out Of Place
Failure Cascade
From One, Many
Heat Lightning
Prayer of the Open Plain
Mantlepiece
The Lonely Atom
A Crack Along The Doorway
You can listen to one of these songs below:
I can’t wait to share the rest with you on March 29th.
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LFG