The vocals on parts of EN-TRO-PY were tracked in the back seat of a Ford truck. Not as a bit. The isolation was right and the reverb sat where it needed to sit, so that’s where the takes happened. Elsewhere on the record, quarter-inch cables got fed back onto metal plates, and the sound of jet engines passing over the building got layered underneath the synthesizers. Some of the studio gear got pushed until it made something unfamiliar, which was the idea.
The album arrived July 23, 2026, eleven tracks running 42 minutes and 28 seconds. Within hours, “Say I Love You” and “Easier That Way” had each approached 200,000 plays on Spotify, with “Wasting My Time,” “Flash,” “Dark Skies,” “Take Me Away From Here,” and “Me And Lady Stardust” also showing early counts. Four songs, “Lift Me Up,” “Hold My Hand (I’ll Hold Your Life),” “2,000 Words,” and “I Don’t Even Know,” don’t display numbers yet. Track lengths run from 2:19 to 5:02. It’s an easy record to sit with front to back, and a strong addition to his catalog.
The title comes from Rudolf Clausius, whose law of entropy holds that everything is random and disordered and keeps accelerating toward disorder until nothing is left. DAN FROM DOWNINGTOWN used it as a metaphor for three people. A man in a relationship, still fantasizing about the partner he had before, so fixated on the past that he doesn’t notice he’s pushing the present away. One stupid mistake and it fades. He’ll describe the record’s arc as a descent from order and contempt into disorder and disarray, and then he stops. “I’d rather let the music speak for itself. I want it to mean something unique to the listener.”
He’s faceless, based somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania he won’t name, originally from Downingtown. Before COVID he drummed on tour. When the world shut down he needed an outlet, and made the EP “Stasis” in 2023. People listened, which he says surprised him. The album “Some KiNd oF nOrimal” followed, plus two covers, and the project kept growing.
EN-TRO-PY was recorded entirely between his apartment and his friend Dom’s place in Massachusetts, where Dom runs an in-home mastering studio called Rainy Day Mastering. Dom mixed, helped produce, and mastered, “all while occasionally yelling at me from fiddling with his EQ and Compressor settings.” Everything else he wrote, performed, and self-produced, with guitar tracks from friends Noah, Mike, Nick, and Steve.
Every song was written in isolation on his living room keyboard, which he notes suits an album this empty. He shuts himself off from everyone and stays alone with his thoughts until the songs are there. It’s been that way since the beginning.
The concept had been in his head since he finished the first EP, but the songs weren’t waiting on it. “Hold My Hand” went out as a single last year while he was still writing the rest of the record. “I need to feel myself in the moment of writing, because if I don’t, I get sick of my music really quick. Better to just put it out there before I get cold feet.”
The closest he comes to a mission statement is a Rush lyric he quotes from memory: “All this machinery making modern music can still be open hearted. Not so coldly charted, it’s really just a question of your honesty.”
He still doesn’t have a clean answer for what to call any of this. “I’ve been labeling it as ‘Alternative,’ but what does that even mean nowadays?” A couple of fans have told him he’s the fifth wave of emo. He’s not touching it. “I feel like if I start calling myself that, then all of my friends who also listen to MCR will run me out of town.”
A live show and a fall festival are in the works, city undecided, with plans to lock it in by the end of July. What he wants the music to do for people is something he says he hasn’t really thought about, and then he thinks about it: he’d like it to make listeners more open about themselves, less afraid to put their thoughts and emotions out there. Which is a reasonable thing to want from a record made by someone who spent months alone with a keyboard, chasing sounds out of broken gear and jet noise until they said what he meant.
