Today, California-based artist Ded Hyatt shares their debut album Glossy, an elegantly gnarled collection of avant art pop that captures the desperate and unmoored feeling of a person whose sense of identity — who they are, where they are going, why they are here — fundamentally shatters amid a seismic personal unraveling.

Throughout, Hyatt confronts his most destructive patterns — curdling nostalgia, the sunk-cost fallacy of a dead end job, the weight of the past, denial and the refusal to interrogate present circumstances — atop a landscape of peculiar, futuristic textures.

Whether it’s a pointillist rendering of a strummed guitar and a folk-pop melody, melancholic mumble rap-via-Brian Eno vocal runs, or prismatic and gut-spilling R&B climaxes, Ded Hyatt proves a compelling protagonist — capable of inhabiting unsettled emotions with an artfully depicted but raw sense of honesty, and an expressive command of his voice.

What results is 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.

“I think time used to feel endless,” reflects Hyatt, “and I felt like I could keep trying things, lives, people on like costumes. Glossy is about realizing that you can’t escape the costumes you tried on. You carry everything you tried on with you.”

Listen to Glossy 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.”