When an artist puts out 32 albums and still manages to surprise themselves, it’s time to pay attention. With Word Gets Around, Longboat doesn’t just deliver another chapter in his dense and unpredictable discography—he turns the page on what experimental pop can sound like in 2025. This isn’t a collection of love songs or mood pieces. These are miniature narratives, each song a self-contained world with a pulse, a plot, and a quiet dare: listen deeper.
If you’re unfamiliar with Longboat, the music might hit like a strange dream—vivid, disorienting, and oddly coherent. It’s not meant to be digested casually, though he welcomes new ears with a sly grin: “There’s something for you here. Stay as long as you want.” And that open invitation is the real hook. You don’t need context; the songs are the context. His melodies often arrive disguised as something more familiar—Eurodisco, cabaret, noir-folk—but quickly shapeshift into something unplaceable. By the time you reach a track like “Euro vs. Disco,” what starts off as genre pastiche veers into something menacing and cinematic, a dance-floor séance with one eye on Suspiria.
There’s humor here, too, but it’s bone-dry and hidden in plain sight. A track like “So Gangsta” (from an earlier album) reveals his capacity to flirt with traditional romance tropes without actually surrendering to them. Even then, the song becomes less about love and more about language—how we try (and often fail) to impress with borrowed slang and soft intentions.
Word Gets Around works best when you surrender to its internal logic. Longboat doesn’t build albums the way most artists do. His songwriting process is an evolving ritual: every track begins as music, but unless the tune can carry a meaningful lyric, it’s cast aside. Temporarily. Nothing is wasted. Songs live in a kind of purgatory until he revisits them, sometimes years later, transforming scraps into full-bodied compositions. That commitment to meaning—every lyric doing its own narrative work—is part of what makes the album so cohesive, despite its genre-hopping.
And the pace? Unreal. While most artists take a year (or more) to complete an album, Longboat recorded Word Gets Around and immediately launched into a second one. Then came three more with a live band. Now he’s working with string orchestras, synths, and preparing for sessions in the UK. By the end of 2025, he expects to have released eleven full albums. The word “prolific” doesn’t quite cut it—it’s more like a controlled creative flood.
But none of this would matter if the music didn’t hit. And it does. It challenges. It confuses, confronts, and occasionally comforts. It also resists easy interpretation. That’s the point. Longboat isn’t here to give you answers or viral hooks. He’s here to mess with your head—in the most sonically compelling way possible.
If Word Gets Around had a secret subtitle, it would be Short Stories, and that feels just right. These aren’t just songs—they’re tight, poetic fictions. Some end without resolution, others linger with the weight of something just out of reach. And while Longboat insists he isn’t sure what people think they know about him, it hardly matters. His music doesn’t reflect who he is. It reflects who we might be when we’re willing to let go of what we expect and just listen.
4489