“The sun would blind them if they could see.”
Welcome to In Conversation, our interview column where we pick the brains of artists on the cutting edge of music. Dobbin chatted to Toby Driver of Kayo Dot, also involved in a host of other projects including mauldin of the Well, Vaura, Extra Life, as well as his solo career. They chatted about Kayo Dot’s upcoming tour, particularly their set at ArcTanGent 2025, Kayo Dot’s upcoming album Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason, and the upcoming 25th anniversary of maudlin of the Well’s seminal albums Bath and Leaving Your Body Map.
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Dobbin T: We’re chatting ahead of the release of Kayo Dot’s upcoming album, Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason, as well as the tour that will support that. Any hints on what material you’ll be drawing from on stage?
Toby Driver: At ArcTanGent festival, it’s going to be a little bit from all the periods of the band, except for the new record, then the tour will mostly be stuff from the new album. This was for a couple of reasons. One is that I didn’t think the ArcTanGent crowd would like the new music very much, and if you’ve heard the record, you know what I’m talking about! The other is that Greg Massi was available for the festival but not the tour, so the ArcTanGent set will require six people, then the rest will require five. So it’s partially logistics too.
Dobbin: When you’re playing ArcTanGent your slot is quite late on the final day – a great thing is that that is a Saturday, so people don’t disappear too soon. You’re playing against Clown Core, which is a bit of a shame. Clown Core is a weird band, and so is Kayo Dot. I really wish they’d put someone more normal on, so all the weirdos can go to one place!
Driver: Yeah! However, I think that whatever Clown Core are doing is completely opposite from what we’re doing. So, someone could make a clear decision on what their interests are, beyond just ‘strange’.
Dobbin: I was lucky enough to see your Choirs of the Eye anniversary show in London at the start of 2023. What an amazing show. How was your experience that day, and the response you get from UK crowds?
Driver: That was a really amazing, fulfilling experience. It was our first Choirs Of The Eye anniversary show, worldwide. Kayo Dot has existed for a long time, over 20 years at this point. When we were touring originally for the record, nobody came to the shows. The album is legendary now, but for years when it came out, nobody really cared. So the legacy of the album is something that came a little bit later. We’ve been touring for many, many years, and the audiences have always been small, it’s a pretty niche band. But every once in a while we get to put together a large show like this, and it’s really amazing. We see that there are people who are really connected to the music and they love it, and it shows us there’s an audience there for it. I think that the difficulty with Kayo Dot’s music is not connecting with people, it’s finding the people. It’s always been a promotional and marketing problem, not the music itself. So we came back and did this Choirs of the Eye anniversary show in London being sold out, everyone was thrilled and knew the music. It showed us that music did have some meaning after so many years of it not feeling like it was being received.
Dobbin: Kayo Dot has always changed what they do every record, and that could not be more true that with Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason. I loved the first single “Oracle by Severed Head” and its direction, then the second, “Closet Door in the Room Where She Died” really surprised me. When I got to spinning it in full, it all fell into place, and it’s really compelling. Even more so than the other Kayo Dot albums, it really focuses on a few key ideas. It’s really coherent, sparse and expansive, yet it’s more vocally focused than any Kayo Dot album. There are subtle yet dramatic shifts in mood across the record. How did you arrive at this sound?
Driver: I was working on this album for a few years. The 20th anniversary of the band is actually 2023, so we’re a little bit late on this one. I was trying to plan for a 20th anniversary album back in 2022, and thought that maybe it would take a year to finish. But when I was working on it at the time, I wasn’t finding exactly what I wanted to say. I had a home studio and was able to make a lot of demos, and I was getting parts from other musicians, doing it piecemeal. I have probably a record and a half of material that was recorded during this time, but it just turned out it wasn’t quite what I wanted to say. A lot of that music is more ‘rock’ oriented; it has some metal beats and drumming, but something wasn’t quite right about it. It felt like I wasn’t moving forward, in a way.
To back up a little bit, I had this idea that the 20th anniversary album would include all the past members of Kayo Dot I could find. We’ve had something like twenty members, and I’m still in touch with a good number of them, so I wanted to mix the line ups up – for example, bringing someone who played drums on Blasphemy to play with a guitarist who did Dousing Anemone With Copper Tongue. They’d never been in a band together, but it would be cool to put them together. However, because of where I was living, and because this music wasn’t ending up the was I wanted it to be, this idea didn’t pan out. But what we ended up with is sort of a version of that – it’s the original line up of Choirs Of The Eye with a few extra people. The different tracks don’t feature everybody, and instead, there’s a different ensemble on each track.
I was having a lot of trouble coming up with what I wanted to say with this album. It becomes more and more difficult with each Kayo Dot record, because I have the intention of doing something fresh. I have to figure out wants not to repeat myself, and find ways to grow as a musician, learn things, and become a better artist, always growing. As I was putting stuff together, I kind of, maybe, made a mistake, I guess? I was moving stuff around, deleting stuff… and there was this happy accident, where I heard something and realised that was actually a good sound. I decided to run with that, and built a lot more tracks and ideas upon it. When that moment hit me, the whole picture of what I wanted the record to be became very clear. It’s like that with art sometimes – you’re searching, you’re searching, you don’t quite know what you’re looking for, but then something happens to set it all off. This did result in me throwing away every previous idea and starting over. Therefore, the process took a few more years, and here we are in 2025. That’s the practical answer, but there’s also a conceptual answer out there, too.
Dobbin: More than ever for Kayo Dot, I feel this record is focused on its sonic qualities, such as changes in timbre, and I feel a lot of drone focus in the way it uses strings and keys. What does the score look like?
Driver: The scores are complex and very specific. It’s not improvisatory music, as with all Kayo Dot’s music. I want to point out that it’s not minimalistic at all – you said it’s very sparse, but it’s actually quite minimalistic. There’s lots of dense harmony and changes going on. It’s timbre focused, but it’s also very specific. I wouldn’t call it drone, as that implies something is static and staying the same, especially in terms of pitch, whereas this music is not doing that and is changing a lot. In the rhythmic moments it’s not repetitive, there aren’t patterns. You’d have to read the whole thing from beginning to end without learning a riff, for example.
Dobbin: The idea of ‘riffs’ is something you have to transplant into Kayo Dot. If you only think about a structure that goes A, B, C, or something, that doesn’t align to what you’re doing.
Driver: Kayo Dot’s always been pretty through-composed. There’s only really one album that has riffs, and that’s Hubardo. That was specifically intended to just invert what Kayo Dot had always been doing, which was through-composed writing. Instead, every song was focused on riffs that repeat. We haven’t really done that again since then. Even though Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike is pretty metal focused, it doesn’t really have riffs.
Dobbin: Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike felt like a new approach to going ‘back to metal’ – is Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason a response to this? It’s very heavy but I wouldn’t call it metal.
Driver: It’s really a response to the past ten years of the band. We’ve always been known for being an experimental band. When we got to Hubardo, we changed this and wrote from a rock perspective. During those years I was trying to make music that is more ‘fun’ to play, for the band and audience. In 2003-2013, it was really enjoyable to play, but it was really demanding a lot of attention from the audience, it wasn’t necessarily enjoyable, not in the same way the audience would go to another show. So that’s why we did a few records like that. This time around, we’ve done ten years of ‘fun rock stuff’, so, time to go back to the experimental!
Dobbin: Next year it’s the 25th anniversary of the mauldin of the Well records Bath and Leaving Your Body Map.
Driver: In fact, more importantly, it’s the 30th anniversary of the band itself.
Dobbin: Right! No pressure, but do you have ideas for anything to celebrate this? Represses, live stuff?
Driver: I’ve been thinking about it – lot of people have been asking for a repress. Everybody that’s playing in Kayo Dot right now was in maudlin of the Well. We have the team kind of on-deck, so everyone’s ready to do something. There are a couple of things that would make it difficulty – the sheer expense of a repress would require a big fundraiser. If we were going to do a new album, I’d have to figure out a way to channel my eighteen year old self. It might be possible to do something in that vein, but the same idea wouldn’t work out. It might be fun to write songs like that, perhaps not as a serious thing. I deliberately don’t write that way any more, so if I revisit that value system it would be fun. I’ve noticed that streaming numbers show that maudlin of the Well, even though it hasn’t done anything and there’s no social media for it, still has more plays than anything else. Maybe if Hellfest said, hey, do a show, that might light the fire to do more stuff. The reunion shows in 2015 were super, super enjoyable. Just that fact is reason enough to do it again.
Dobbin: I chatted to several bands at ArcTanGent last year, asking them which of the previous headliners were their favourites. I’m not sure if this is exactly your sound, but are there any among them that jump out, or a perfect line up for you?
Driver: As a person with a band that’s trying to form its own identity, it’s difficult to associate us with any particular scene, such as progressive metal. The fact that we’re only playing a subset of our material is a bit of a problem, you know? But on the other side, we can’t really be in the black metal scene, we aren’t ‘evil’ enough, not enough blast beats… It’s more helpful for us not to be in a scene, as this gives us the freedom to do what we want, without people having these expectations. However, I do like this music. I’m really excited to see Karnivool – I’m not too familiar with them, but what I’ve seen suggests they’re a really good band. I’m excited to see TesseracT too, as I don’t often go to shows for that kind of progressive metal. I’ve already seen Wardruna and Godspeed You! Black Emperor a few times, so this year seems very cool. In terms of previous years, I’d love to see Devin Townsend, I’ve never caught him before. I’d love to see Shellac – that 2018 line up is really interesting (Glassjaw, Shellac and And So I Watch You From Afar).
For the full conversation with more details on all of the above, check out the podcast on your favourite platform. Kayo Dot’s new album, Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason, will release through Prophecy Productions on the 1st August and can be pre-ordered here.