We’re diving into the mind-bending sonic vortex of “Hallucinations” by Stray Planets, and trust us, this is the kind of track that hijacks your senses and leaves you questioning your own reality. If you like your music safe, predictable, and built for shopping malls, turn back now. For everyone else, let’s ride.
Stray Planets is the project of Dublin cult psych-pop savant, John Butler. This guy’s a goddamn shapeshifter, a psychedelic architect who builds entire otherworlds with sound. For this new EP, Are You Real, Cristobal Leedy?, he’s once again teamed up with acclaimed producer Rían Trench, and together they’ve forged a kaleidoscopic blessing that’s both timeless and violently new. But for “Hallucinations”, Butler brings in a secret weapon that sends the track into the stratosphere: Dara Kiely, the incendiary vocalist from the revered Dublin quartet Gilla Band.
And what is this tripped-out juggernaut actually about? The track is inspired by the story of a woman at the mercy of a faulty AI, helplessly watching as images of herself are twisted into all kinds of strange ways. This is some dystopian nightmare set to a Technicolour triumph of sound. Butler lays down the foundation—warped, era-flipping that pulls from shoegaze and psych-pop, creating a prismatic and lysergic bed of sound. Then, Kiely steps to the mic and absolutely torches it. His vocal performance is the chaotic heart of the track, embodying the confusion, terror, and raw humanity of someone seeing their very identity digitally corrupted.
This is rock for the end times, a resistance against the cold, unfeeling grip of the algorithm. It’s a wild, risky, and beautiful collision of human emotion and technological dread. Butler and Kiely are a match made in psychedelic heaven, or maybe hell—a perfect partnership that results in a track so vivid it feels like a fever dream you never want to wake from. “Hallucinations” is a definitive statement from an enigmatic cult auteur like Stray Planets, hitting his absolute stride. This is the real shit. Don’t sleep on it.
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