Albums
Soft New Magic Dream
2025
Genre: Psychedelic
Release Date: 2025
By Samuel Hyland
Reviewed June 13, 2025
The Pittsburgh synth misfits reopen the haunted funhouse with their first album since 2018. The ooky-spooky hypnagogia hasn’t changed much, but it’s not stale yet.
Oscar Wilde knew it, Roald Dahl knew it, and Black Moth Super Rainbow know it, too: the most fucked-up stories are fairy tales. In the grainy video for “All 2 of Us,” the woozy lead single of , grotesque clowns gnaw on hamburgers with their mouths open, salivate over human flesh, and bare their fangs with sadistic, slack-jawed glee. It’s meets Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, a psych-pop lullaby set against a psychological thriller. In the insular world of BMSR, is it necessarily new? For two decades and counting, the Pittsburgh band has churned out synthy dreamscapes with a dreadful edge, music for the moment a weed brownie makes you nauseous. At the band’s online shop, you can purchase a vinyl record, or, if you like, a shrunken head preserved in eternal anguish. If this new album is an attempt, in the words of its first song, to “Open the Fucking Fantasy,” the desire seems misplaced—the fantasy has been open, and unchanging, since 2003. Is it still magic or just muscle memory?