Declan O'Donovan

Within the earthy, baroque psychedelia of his 3rd album, Amok, Declan O’Donovan meditates on losing track of time. It’s a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with—”a pedestrian and profound thing to do,” as the Yukon songwriter puts it. Amok is hardly a linear narrative, though, with a beginning, middle, and end; the album and the characters who populate it twist and pull time, fall out of it and into it, find themselves transformed by it.

“I lived on the Californian coast, hiked through the boreal forest, borrowed from friends and family, stole from Exodus and Joseph Campbell,” O’Donovan says. “I lit a fire, fell asleep, got woke, got high, got Covid, got angry at the church, lost my keys, and split the atom.”

Amok takes sonic cues from the places it was born in, geographically and mentally. It bends, sometimes, toward grandeur, like the vast and mountainous terrain surrounding O’Donovan’s northern Canadian hometown of Whitehorse, where most of the songs were written. It trades in a lushness of sound that recalls the all-encompassing greenery of Vancouver Island, where it was recorded. And it reels with a similar terror and revelatory spirit that descended upon O’Donovan during a mushroom trip in the rainforest on that same west coast before he began writing these songs.