Today, april27 — an artist whose captivating music serves as the means for building the world of an ongoing “surrealist horror love story” —  shares his new EP The Electric Chair. It’s a trippy concoction of liminal acid house, haunted R&B, and traditional sacred Indian music: Aeolian Dominant scales and whispered, androgynous vocals seducing you deeper into the non-Euclidean corridors of a confounding hallucination.

On The Electric Chair, april27 emerges to reveal a darkly infectious pop melodicism that evokes everything from Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” to Billie Eilish’s “CHIHIRO.” Heavily inspired by dream logic, half-remembered TV programs viewed in childhood (he specifically references MTV Liquid Television, Æon Flux, Kim Possible, and The Grim Adventures Of Billy & Mandy), and the TB-303 acid bassline sequencer, it’s a thrilling and eerie collection of sleep paralysis rave music.

Listen to The Electric Chair here.

Along with the EP, april27 also shares the glitchy, otherworldly video for “relieve the pressure.” april27 says of the video: “‘relieve the pressure,’ along with this whole album, is meant to be an exaggerated, animated story of a really weird night. I used to love this movie ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” which used very primitive visual and storytelling techniques to present a strange tale. Similarly, I wanted the song to feel immensely claustrophobic, noisy, slightly off and creepy, but ultimately danceable and the video to reflect this sense of janky early CGI stumbling.”

Watch “relieve the pressure” here.

april27 broke through with “prayer1,” a mysterious and yearning track built upon a sample of his grandmother praying that falls somewhere between House Of Balloons-era The Weekend and Fred again… It catapulted to more than 50 million streams, over 1 million likes on TikTok and over 125k organic creates, amassing a cult following over night. Since then, fans initially attracted by the siren song of “prayer1” have tuned into subsequent singles like “into a g**,” “senses,” “greymatter,” and “renaissance man” seeking to make sense of april27’s singular output.

Through his videos and social media posts, april27 is building a world beyond the music. The aesthetic, inspired by the strategies employed in video game open-world level design and all rendered and authored by april27, smashes the sparse smoothness of modernity against the unknowable contours of Eastern spirituality. He says the music is all composed in a tunnel between a temple and a nightclub — a statement on liminality or purgatory, it’s not quite clear. It suggests a soul in crisis, or a society in decline, or perhaps something yet to be discovered.