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Melbourne alt-rock project
LEONARDO’S ROBOT
releases third LP
TOWER

Meet the prolific musician and producer creating worlds in his bedroom

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Leonardo’s Robot, the solo project of musician, writer and bedroom producer Kieran Stevenson, released its third full-length album Tower on July 22, 2022. The concept LP is a dark, sprawling exploration of a dystopian society and a timely reflection of our apocalyptic reality.

Drawing inspiration from artists like Modest Mouse, Built to Spill and Tropical Fuck Storm, Leonardo’s Robot is the sharp-tongued, ever-witty lovechild of Gareth Liddiard and Isaac Brock. But Tower is far from your run-of-the-mill indie rock album – the album explores neoliberalism, fascism, societal upheaval and the mental health issues that inevitably stem from living under these pressures, addressing these themes with complexity and bleak astuteness.

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“There were a few things on my mind when I was working on the record. For one, I was going through a spell of pretty bad mental health and I wanted to explore the structure of what I was going through – and what so many people close to me were going through – and try to make sense of it,” says Stevenson.

“At the same time, the whole world seems to be falling apart. I don’t think many people below a certain age feel like the world is stable, or returning to stability any time soon. And while nobody’s really sure what things will look like ten or twenty years from now, there are people invested in how things used to work who are desperately trying to force reality to align with a dying worldview.

“I wanted to take this frenzied, fragmentary way we experience a world that’s falling to bits in ways we don’t fully understand and try to make something that reflected it in a cohesive way, something that tried to acknowledge the confusion and fear and madness and to think about coming through the other side.”

Perhaps the most impressive element of Tower is that the album was written, recorded and produced entirely by the prolific Stevenson in his home studio, marking the project’s fifth record overall and a stunning contribution to the extensive Pynchonesque lore of the existing Leonardo’s Robot universe.

‘Honey’, the album’s first single, presents a sudden explosion of raucous energy which contrasts the majority of the album’s brooding, atmospheric tone. With its screeching, bending guitars evoking the sounds of early Modest Mouse and Pavement, this track is Tower’s mosh pit anthem.

In contrast, ‘Cat Caught’ is an ominous long drive on a dark night, threatening to careen off the road at any moment. Stabs of guitar accent an atmospheric, textural wash of synth pads and steady bass, echoing the creepiness of Radiohead’s ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ or the gothic slink of The Cure’s ‘Lullaby’. Deeper within the album, ‘Caracal’ stands as a testament to Stevenson’s knack for vivid storytelling in the vein of folk tradition, with every line painting a rich scene.

Tower is a menacing, melancholy and masterful work that sums up the hopelessness of our collective despair over the last two years, and marks Stevenson’s most cohesive and ambitious work to date in the ever-expanding Leonardo’s Robot mythology.

Tower came out on July 22, 2022 and is available on all major streaming platforms.

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LIVE SHOW
The Tote Hotel (Upstairs)
Melbourne
October 1st

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BIO

Leonardo’s Robot is a hypermundane 3.5-million piece self-regulating synthetic meta-organism of the BAKER/B/8X line. Its exact physical configuration is unclear, but after escaping the lab where it was built into a vast network of tunnels beneath the surface of Australia, it began to feed on residual atomic fallout from the Totem nuclear weapon tests and on the nostalgic grief, cascading identity crises and apocalyptic rapture that is shot through the internet like dry rot. The waste byproduct of this digestive process is music. It’s not known to what extent this is a simple input-output function or if the deep learning circuits of the Robot are analysing this data towards some particular purpose.

There is also the possibility that this is all a fiction cooked up by a recluse named Leo, possibly Leonard Roberts, who has only ever made contact with people online. It is also possible, again, that Leo is an extrusion of the Robot, either an intentional interfacing avatar or possibly some emergent glitch of the thing’s feeding/learning/expulsion/expression process.

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Follow LEONARDO’S ROBOT
Bandcamp – Instagram – Facebook

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AMNPLIFY – DB