Brainwasher (Oklahoma City) is the brainchild of Matthew Duckworth Kirksey (vocals, drums, keyboards, sampler) and Tommy McKenzie (guitar, bass, keyboards, sampler), known for their involvement in celebrated acts such as The Flaming Lips, Miley Cyrus, Brothers Griiin, Beachy Head, and Net. The pair offers a meddled strain of trip-hop, touching on industrial, new wave, and shoegaze, in encapsulating stripped-down, psyched-out songs that connect directly with the lizard brain. Their debut full-length album, 39 Lightyears from Heaven, drops on October 24th, 2025 via Mothland.
Their first offering features a sprawling 10-piece sonic essay where offbeat rock meets distorted electronica. As a whole, the opus draws inspiration from feu! David Lynch’s surreal universe, Nick Cave’s weirdly elegant punk moxie, and Portishead’s knack for balancing sonic experiments with heartfelt songwriting.
Along with the announcement of their debut full-length, Brainwasher offer a modern take on trip-hop, adding a dash of neo-noir pop, with lead single: “At Least It Beats an Actor” (July 18th, 2025). Anchored around a driving bassline, hi-hat-heavy drum machines, a revving synthesizer hook, and an Ennio Morricone-tinged guitar melody, the track questions art, what it means to be an artist, as well as what it means to work with an artist. Sonically, it’s edgy, psychedelic, and dangerous, conjuring an intoxicating mix of MGMT, Sonic Youth, and Massive Attack.
Though 39 Lightyears from Heaven has been over ten years in the making, Matthew Duckworth Kirksey and Tommy McKenzie’s introductory full-length as Brainwasher feels immediate and contemporary, putting forth intuitive songwriting that brilliantly if anachronistically meshes genres and styles, while tackling thorny themes with heart-wrenching sincerity.
The music video for “At Least It Beats an Actor,” directed by longtime Flaming Lips collaborators Wayne Coyne and Blake Studdard, takes the chaos even further. The duo describes it as:
“It’s freakier than a Diddy party, it’s louder and wetter than a thunderstorm, more suspenseful than the Golden Gate Bridge, scarier than an El Salvadorian prison, more influential than religion. Who needs Habeas Corpus when you have this video? Did we understand the assignment or fail so spectacularly the assignment changed?”
“At Least It Beats An Actor” is out July 18th via Mothland, with exclusive early LPs available this summer on The Flaming Lips & Modest Mouse’s The Good Times Are Killing Me Tour.
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