Today, California-based artist Ded Hyatt announces Glossy, a debut album due out October 11 that emerges from a period of loss, bleak reckonings, and personal transformation. Within a soundworld of ice-pulsed synthesizers, pitch-shifted voice shadows, squelching digital pluckings, and jarringly inhuman drum machine rhythms, Ded Hyatt confronts his most destructive patterns with an artfully depicted but raw sense of honesty.

“Sometimes there’s a poetry or beauty to be had if you don’t actually expose something,” Hyatt elaborates. “There’s something sacred that would disperse if you addressed it. But there’s a danger to ignoring that and protecting this supposed sanctity.”

Spanning pointillist folk, melancholic mumble rap-via-Brian Eno vocal runs, and prismatic and gut-spilling R&B, Glossy reconfigures an exploded life with an imagistic and collagist poetic sensibility. It’s a daring and deeply personal depiction of trauma’s collective toll — one that grasps for a way forward, despite the looming specter of further loss.

Pre-order / pre-save Glossy here.

Ded Hyatt also shares the video for that album’s lead single “Devotion,” a track that casts heart-rending balladry and Frippertronics across a landscape of peculiar, futuristic texture as it sketches out a poisonous relationship dynamic, where one partner risks sublimating themself to the point of erasure.

Watch the “Devotion” video by urika’s bedroom & Vivian Buenrostro, here.

Born in Mountain View, CA to a Jewish-American mother and an Iranian father, Hyatt often felt between worlds. “I have never felt at home in any one culture; I have always felt like an outlier. In white and Jewish circles, I’ve been exoticized — in Persian circles, I’m the American white boy.” His mother exposed him to melodic songcraft of R&B from Motown to Usher, his father the expressive voices of traditional Persian balladry.

A post-collegiate hike along the Pacific Crest Trail helped Hyatt realize his desire to be an artist. “I decided that music and writing were the only things I genuinely cared about, so I moved to LA with my girlfriend at the time and started making an album and writing a screenplay. I quickly realized that I dreaded sitting down to work on the screenplay and was obsessed with working on the album, so I dropped screenwriting and dedicated myself to music full time.”

While hiking the PCT, he fixated on the name Ded Hyatt, a play on Arabic and Farsi homonyms. “I liked that these beautiful Farsi and Arabic words were hiding in plain sight in the name of a white corporate hotel chain,” Hyatt elaborates. “I also find hotels to be very surreal places— most of my dreams take place in hotels.”

Earlier this year, Ded Hyatt released “Chlorine,” an elusive yet melodic song featured on Glossy that examines the pernicious allure of nostalgia. Watch the “Chlorine” video here.