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Photo by Grace Anthony Schmidt

Some records are all about becoming someone, or some life change that makes you feel like a new person. My Piledriver Heart, the new album from Brooklyn’s Superfan, is about finally being himself. Across the ten song tracklist, Kali Priya Flanagan trades the pop machinery of his past for something looser, stranger, and a whole lot more his own. What he calls “Acousticello” turns out to be a song worth getting lost in and fall in love with. 

Superfan began as Flanagan’s solo project, but cellist Omeed Almassi’s string arrangements have become its beating heart, giving the songs a noisy, magnetic pull that sits somewhere between folk, chamber music, and pop-rock balladry. Deeply turned acoustic guitar and Eastern musical influences fill out the world, and the album was recorded largely live with Almassi and producer Hudson Pollock. That live-in-a-room approach really comes across here, and does wonders in portraying the themes of heartbreak, independence, and hopeful melancholia, and the songs built to breathe rather than be polished into submission. 

It also helps that this is Flanagan’s first release outside the record deal he signed at 14. Before Superfan, when he was KALI, a pandemic-era pop prospect with millions of streams and a calendar full of five-hour writing sessions with strangers. MPDH reads like the opposite of that, like it’s antithesis. “This time around, it was about being (myself) versus becoming myself,” he says, and you can feel the shift in how the record carries itself. 

“In the Gold Room” opens the album and sets the tone, with Flanagan’s live video, shot inside the Agger Fish Building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, offering the clearest picture of how the band works in the same space. “Miss W Jones” and “Picture of Return,” both released earlier, hold up as anchors, and “Apeiron (Fantasy Football)” might have the best title of the year. Elsewhere, “Jason Powers or The Underminer” and “Ode to Hum (I want it to rise)” hint at a writer who knows his way around a strange, memorable name. The album closes with “Joy,” which feels like exactly the right place to land. 

What ties it all together is the idea at its very center. Flanagan describes the record as an acknowledgement of life and love’s ebbs and flows “from a place of comfort within the self,” and the music backs him up. Experimentation here isn’t a way to hide the songs. It’s how he gets closer to them. The pop-rock ballad is still in there, just pushed until it cracks open. 

For a guy who opened for The Strokes at Red Rocks and then quietly became a fixture of New York’s DIY scene, My Piledriver Heart feels like the album that makes the quiet part official. Superfan hit the road across Europe and the UK from October 27 to November 13, sixteen dates from Berlin to Porto. If this is what comfort in yourself sounds like, it’s worth showing up to hear it live. 

Listen to My Piledriver Heart below: