Landroid Announces “Constellation” with New Single “Hank the Dragon”
Photo by Errol Colandro
Landroid is what happens when two lifelong musicians trade the grit of the Los Angeles punk scene for the weirdness of the High Desert. Cooper Gillespie and Greg Gordon relocated to Landers, California, and their sound opened up with the arid horizon. Their 2019 debut, “Imperial Dunes,” drew comparisons to Lynchian dream sequences, but their forthcoming album, “Constellation,” reaches further, tracing an arc from the Gnostic creation myth to a single gunshot that alters two lives forever.
Beyond the studio, Gillespie and Gordon built Mojave Gold, a Joshua Tree venue the Los Angeles Times called the desert's most promising new music space. The same community-driven ethos shapes their work.
Photo by Jesse Dvorak
The band comes off as channeling the vibes of a neo-noir crime drama set to testimonials from Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. Full-spectrum weird Americana, just more subtle, and their new single, "Hank the Dragon" offers that first glimpse into the upcoming “Constellation,” holding both the expansive and the intimate in a single frame.
"Hank The Dragon" opens with a dramatic, dangerously psychedelic pulse. Ominous synths wail like air raid sirens as the sun dips and rises along Death Valley's horizon, burning orange-and-purple twilight into your retinas like a peyote-fueled evil omen pulled straight from a Panos Cosmatos film. Then the main beat drills its way into the track with a surprisingly upbeat tempo, and the whole song shifts into a coherent yet wildly different direction.
Sweaty punk noise still crawls through the guitars from the back, remnants of the bandmates' former sounds surfacing from the gutter. But the desert asserts itself more forcefully across the same strings, its wide starlit skies opening into stoner and prog soundscapes that stretch across the entire production. You can identify some ingredients in what Landroid is cooking. The rest remains excitingly new.
Photo by Jesse Dvorak
In “Hank the Dragon,” Landroid centers the song on the unresolved question “Are we still made of all the things that made us fall in love?” Those early wailing synths become the sound of replaying conversations inside your own head, patting yourself down to see if a key emotional element has been dropped somewhere along the way. You know something has gone terribly wrong. Can this relationship be saved? You wonder. The band holds that question up to the light and lets us contemplate that relentless anxiety, but with the most mind-blowing musical backing you could hope for.