Longboat Experiments with Sounds on New Album ‘Word Gets Around’
It’s easy to miss a release like Word Gets Around if you’re not tuned into the wavelength where experimental pop, jazz bones, and digital anxiety converge. But that’s kind of the point. Igor Keller, operating under his long-running moniker Longboat, doesn’t scream for attention. He doesn’t have to. He’s 32 albums in, crafting music not to ride a trend or game the algorithm, but to document the slow unraveling of modern life with surgical precision and dry wit. His latest record doesn’t just describe the noise—it lives in it, chews on it, and spits it back in minimalist bursts of synth-pop bleakness.
Keller may have hung up his saxophone, but the ghosts of jazz still rattle around inside his compositional instincts. He treats structure like a jazz musician treats time: something to bend, stretch, occasionally snap, but never discard. It gives Word Gets Around a strange elasticity, a pop record that feels like it’s been mapped by an architect who favors dissonance over design trends. The hooks are there, but they arrive crooked, often cloaked in lyrics about collapsing economies, media nausea, and the sort of ambient rage that builds from watching your city slowly lose its soul.
Take “Yelltown,” for instance, a sad and startling portrait of Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, rebranded with a name that feels far too accurate. It’s not a protest song. There’s no rallying cry. Instead, Keller quietly catalogs the despair, the yelling, the chaos with the cool detachment of someone who has accepted that the storm isn’t passing—it’s just part of the weather now.
What’s remarkable is how Keller fuses this emotional and political fatigue into music that still grooves. Tracks snap with electronic precision, synth lines dart around his dry vocal delivery, and the production (with engineer Ryan Leyva) is intentionally raw—closer to a war dispatch than a polished studio affair. It’s music that invites close listening, but never panders. There’s no spoon-feeding, no cinematic catharsis. Just the sound of a man reflecting the static of the world back at us with quiet urgency.
What elevates Word Gets Around beyond commentary is Keller’s commitment to keeping things human—even as he’s sounding the alarm about the coming wave of AI-powered art. He’s not afraid of robots making bad music. He’s afraid people won’t notice the difference. That dread permeates the record like smoke, not in paranoid manifestos but in small, deliberate moments: a lyric that stings a little too hard, a melody that flickers and dies just as it becomes recognizable.
This isn’t the work of an artist looking for likes or sync deals. Keller writes for himself, his wife, his friends—and maybe that’s why the music feels immune to trend fatigue. It doesn’t chase relevance. It is relevant, because it dares to describe what most of us would rather scroll past.
At 11 planned albums for the year, Keller’s ambition is almost absurd. But if Word Gets Around is any indication, it’s not ambition for ambition’s sake. It’s about chronicling the experience of living through a time that feels increasingly unlivable—and doing so with humor, skill, and a whole lot of stubborn humanity.
