Graham Hunt can’t stop making records. Since 2019, the Madison, WI-based songwriter has been amassing a dense catalog of singular music at a pace rivaled only by the quality of the output itself. Now already on his sixth album, American Pyramid, Hunt pushed himself out of his comfort zones, eschewing the homespun, computer-oriented explorations of his previous work and instead entering Minnesota’s legendary Pachyderm Studio with an eight-piece band to try and capture a different side of his boundless creativity. The result is an album that stretches out musically and lyrically, with Hunt using his surrealist spin to dissect both the traditions of American indie rock as well as the unnerving detachment of the American experience itself.
American Pyramid arrives barely a year after Hunt’s 2025 album, Timeless World Forever, the final release in a trilogy of records and a capstone on a significant part of his life. “I knew I was going to be moving from this house where the home studio is, so I gave myself the limitation of making those three albums that specific way, and then I knew I’d do something different,” he explains. “Part of me felt like I could live in that house and make an infinite amount of records there with the same process forever, but for a long time I’d also had this vision for tracking an album live with a band in a studio–I knew that’s how I wanted to make the next record even before I wrote any songs for it.” Hunt’s innate creative restlessness has always served him well but it wasn’t enough to simply record the songs with a group rather than alone: he even self-imposed limitations on the writing process itself, choosing to avoid demoing on the computer or even fleshing out the songs beyond simple iphone voice memos. “I wanted to keep it to just chords and melody and then figure out the rest with a group of people in a live room studio setting, I just hadn’t done it like that in a very long time.”
And this would be no ordinary live band, instead a group of eight fellow multi-instrumentalists, each an impressive creative in their own right, all assembled to help Hunt see his vision through. “I was thinking about all the people who have played in my band in all its different iterations over the years, and I just wanted to try and get as many of them involved as possible,” he explains. “We only did two rehearsals before we went into the studio and everyone ended up swapping instruments and changing roles throughout recording. That sort of helped to recreate some of the feeling of what I do when I’m making music with the computer, but executed with a full band.”
—
Minneapolis’ Prize Horse make “a fuzzy, dreamy form of alt-rock that manages to be heavy and spaced-out at the same time” (Stereogum). The trio’s debut album, Under Sound, embarks their musical evolution which takes flight with ethereal, fuzz-laden tones departing from the grittier layers of their previous 2021 Welder EP.