Longboat, the shape-shifting project of Seattle musician Igor Keller, is back with Word Gets Around, a new album that bites down on media overload, societal burnout, and economic disillusionment. It’s the first of eleven albums planned for this year, and it wastes no time making its point.
The title track hits like a corrupted news feed. “Bare Minimum Society” and “Citizen Sweatpants” both feel ripped from your Twitter scroll, sonically minimal but lyrically dense. Keller keeps things stripped down on the production end—sharp drum machines, lean synths, and the occasional analog haunt—but it’s the vocal delivery that carries the punch. It’s dry, sarcastic, sometimes detached. Think spoken word filtered through a pixelated megaphone.
With a background in jazz saxophone, Keller knows structure, even when he’s subverting it. Word Gets Around follows no pop template, yet remains listenable, maybe even danceable, if you’re the type to throw a party with Orwell paperbacks lying around. The mood swings from amused to furious to almost elegiac in tracks like “Twilight of the Publicist.”
There’s no romantic escape here, no love story to hold onto. That’s deliberate. Keller has long avoided writing about romance, and here he doubles down on that editorial stance. The world doesn’t need another break-up song. It needs a breakup with complacency. And that’s exactly what Word Gets Around attempts: a rupture, not a balm.
The album is part of a larger Longboat blueprint—multiple LPs released each year, each its own world. This one happens to be the loudest. It’s a reminder that experimental doesn’t have to mean inaccessible. Sometimes it just means more honest. And honestly? Word Gets Around might be the most essential indie protest record of the year.