Cosmic Thrill Seekers, the new record from Albany punk rock band Prince Daddy & the Hyena, is many things. It is an odyssey of epic, The Monitor-esque proportions, a great, galloping sonic roadtrip across space and time and Albany, boomeranging around a horn of punk, pop, indie, garage rock, and orchestral, Queen-style arrangements and theatrics; it is an exploration of the fall-out after an acid trip, manic self-destruction, bottoming-out and recovering, and then slipping again; it is a candid, acute documentation of frontperson Kory Gregory’s cyclical mental health states as told through three acts and 14 songs/chapters; it is an existential presentation of eternal return theory, a victory via surrender to impermanence; and perhaps most of all, it is about Dorothy Gale and The Wizard Of Oz.
“Dorothy was the OG cosmic thrill seeker,” Gregory says. “Dorothy kind of encompasses everything I was trying to get at.”
There are three acts in Cosmic Thrill Seekers. Gregory explains, “Act One is The Heart, which is the Tin Man. Act Two is The Brain, which is the Scarecrow, and Act Three is The Roar, which is the Lion.” Each act explores a stage in Gregory’s mental health. “I remember watching the Wizard of Oz one time, and noticing some weird kind of parallels between the cyclical nature of my mental health and that movie,” he says. “My mental health rotates and jumps from one stage to the next, and then repeats itself.” The closing moments of Cosmic Thrill Seekers reflect this, as the outro to the last track, “The Wacky Misadventures of the Passenger,” morphs into the first muted notes of opener “I Lost My Life.”
Gregory’s assessment of his mental health is a process that’s coded into CTS’ DNA. “Observing my mental health for four years kind of gave me enough to work with to write this album,” Gregory continues. He wrote the entire record—music and lyrics—in solitude over a four year period in a closet in his bedroom. No one heard any of it until it was finished and ready to record—not even bandmates Cam, Zak, and Daniel. “When you have OCD like me, you want it to be perfect,” Gregory says of the process. During recording at PonderRosa Studios in Lafayette, New Jersey with producer Nick Dardaris (AKA beloved pal and Albany scene comrade Scoops), Gregory would ask his bandmates to leave before his vocal takes. Even pre-studio practices were held without a PA system, meaning no one else knew any of the words or melodies.
The process and finished product are tributes to the sort of friendship and community supports that define Prince Daddy. Gregory’s bandmates are his best friends, and they encouraged him to pursue the record he needed to make.
