We Speak Music

Lyle Muskat to Release New Single “Choose Love” on May 15

Published

2 months ago

May 9, 2025

A heartfelt message of unity in a divided world, featuring vocalist Robyn Black

Acclaimed multi-genre musician and songwriter Lyle Muskat is set to release his poignant new single, “Choose Love,” on May 15, 2025. Featuring the stirring vocals of guest artist Robyn Black, the song is a powerful and timely reminder of the importance of compassion, empathy, and peace in today’s increasingly polarized world.

“‘Choose Love’ is a song I wrote about how some children are taught to hate, and others to love,” says Muskat. “But as we grow, we all make our own choice. With everything going on in the world—violence, hate, and division—I feel the message to choose love is more relevant than ever.”

With lyrics that speak directly to the human spirit, the song blends Muskat’s signature emotional depth with elements of blues, soul, and pop, creating an atmosphere both tender and powerful. The addition of Robyn Black’s commanding vocal performance to Muskat’s prolific piano playing elevates the track’s universal message, offering a soulful interpretation that resonates long after the last note.

A lifelong musician, Lyle Muskat began his artistic journey at the piano as a child and started performing professionally by age 17. Over the years, he has toured and recorded with a wide variety of bands, mastering styles from rock and reggae to country, jazz, blues, and pop. His genre-spanning career has included collaborations with artists from Canada, the U.S., the UK, and Japan, helping shape a distinctive, globally influenced, and melodic sound.

Muskat has released four studio albums, with his most recent work, 88 Floors, showcasing both his technical artistry and deep storytelling ability. “Choose Love” marks the next step in his evolution as an artist with a purpose—creating music that advocates for unity and peace while bridging cultures through sound.

Looking ahead, Muskat is currently working on a new blues/soul project, scheduled for release in 2026.

“Choose Love” will be available on all major streaming platforms May 15.

We Speak Music

Mutual Shock’s Nervous Systems Showcases The Architecture of Alienation

Published

2 hours ago

June 23, 2025

Philomena Marie

Seattle’s ever-shifting musical landscape has long given rise to voices that thrive in the gray areas—between genres, between moods, between identities. Dan Powers, the artist behind Mutual Shock, adds a new entry into that canon with Nervous Systems, a debut album that operates as both sonic exorcism and sociocultural diagnosis. At its core, the record is a meditation on life under late capitalism—a terrain where dread, detachment, and digital blur are not just thematic textures, but everyday conditions.

Emerging from the shadowy emotional terrain explored on his 2024 EP Stimulus Progression, Powers takes his vision further here—not louder, but deeper. Nervous Systems doesn’t seek to overwhelm. Instead, it seeps in. It’s less an album you “hear” and more one you slowly inhabit, like a strange new architecture that reveals its structure room by room. The choice of analog synths and skeletal drum programming isn’t retro affectation; it’s a design choice rooted in feeling, in tension, in deliberate control.

Mutual Shock sits in conversation with a lineage of outsider electronic music—Drab Majesty’s theatrical alienation, Molchat Doma’s post-Soviet nostalgia, the mechanized introspection of Nine Inch Nails—but avoids being pinned down by any one aesthetic. Powers is less interested in genre homage than he is in emotional architecture. Each sound feels like a corridor leading somewhere disorienting yet familiar, like a half-remembered dream of an office building at night.

Thematically, the album is deeply of this moment. It’s about burnout, yes, but not in the way we meme it. It’s about the deeper erosion beneath the hustle: the spiritual confusion, the existential rootlessness, the constant digital hum that keeps us from ever fully arriving in our own lives. Powers channels these anxieties not with histrionics, but with careful understatement—letting the atmosphere do the heavy lifting. It’s as much sociology as it is art.

What makes Nervous Systems so vital is that it doesn’t offer escape. Instead, it offers recognition. In a time when much of culture aims to distract, Mutual Shock chooses to reflect. Powers holds a mirror to the disquiet and lets it speak—not with panic, but with precision. The result is an album that lingers long after the final note, not as a soundtrack to alienation, but as a language for it.