Provoker

By the time Provoker released 2023’s Demon Compass, they were already talking about their next album. The LA synth-pop trio were on a roll, and the songs kept coming. Holed up in an Echo Park attic, frontman Christian Crow Petty began to think of hauntings — him as a specter in his friends’ house, or the apparitions and memories that follow us around.

“It did make me feel like I was a ghost,” Petty laughs about his stint in the attic. “You’re the one making the creaks in the ceiling.” But as much as Mausoleum’s thematic content was defined by isolation, the music was the most communal of Provoker’s career.

“Before, we were pretty reclusive,” Petty explains. Mausoleum found the trio working with a host of talented collaborators, including Elliot Kozel, Simon Christensen, Mikey Freedom Hart, and Zach Fogarty — all of it overseen by executive producer Kenneth Blume, fka Kenny Beats.

When they first met up with Blume it was intended as a social hang, but after playing him a track he asked if he could rework it. This blossomed into an executive producer role which saw him take the nearly-completed Mausoleum and push the album to new heights. “He made it sound like us, but way bigger,” Lopez recalls.

With Blume’s guiding hand, Provoker achieved a new sense of grandeur. Three albums in, Mausoleum is an evolution, their unique sound rendered bolder and sharper than ever before.