Eventually, Kory goes to bed and the next morning his friend texted him back and was like ‘Oh man, I’m sorry. ![]() Kory hadn’t talked to him for over a decade, but the whole night Kory is trying to call him back, freaking out that he missed his call, because he even called Kory’s mom, too. Kory missed the phone call and then listened to the voicemail and was very worried because he sounded like he was drunker than ever before, and also borderline suicidal. “And as for the voicemail,” adds Dasilva, “it was left by a friend of Kory’s who called Kory one night. It’s my favorite song that I’ve ever written, because I haven’t really thought about what happened or ever written about it since, but the end result is something that I’m super proud of.” “I had a stint with depression that almost cost me my life,” explains Gregory, “and this song is the first time I ever wrote about it. A song that chugs with the anguish of existence, it begins with a voicemail before slowly building into a layered, emotional slow-motion frenzy of redemptive guitars. In fact, penultimate song, “Black Mold” is a brooding, near-nine minute long lament in which the frontman revisits one of the bleakest times in his entire life to date. Whether Gregory is relaying his fears more vicariously and allegorically though The Collector or in a more direct fashion, Prince Daddy & The Hyena delves deep into the heart of darkness at its core. When people hear me singing about the character on this record that isn’t me, I want them to picture that, because it’s a really fucking frightening image!” “To me,” he says, “that photo is the essence of the record. Ideally, Gregory wants the listener to imagine The Collector as the photo of his cousin that graces the cover album artwork. The Collector, says Gregory, is really just “depression or death in corporeal form”, the unimaginable fate that awaits us all personified. That said, there are some traditional concept record trademarks present on the album, including a recurring character called The Collector who crops up in different places throughout it. It’s a snapshot of what I was going through when I wrote these songs.” So everything I wrote in quarantine was about the same thing, about my fear of dying. “I feel like any record I write is going to be a kind of concept record,” he says, “because I have an obsessive mind and get caught up in something and just write. But that, he clarifies, is just what always happens anyway when he writes. To some extent, then, you could call this a kind of concept album, but it’s an accidental one – less intentional than a by-product of the morbid thoughts Gregory was having at the time manifesting themselves into songs by way of catharsis. It’s the first time that it’s hit me as an adult, the first time that the impermanence of everything struck, and that sent me into a little existential spiral.” My fear of mortality in the most loose, broad sense of the word. It’s my fear of me dying, my parents dying, my loved ones dying, my fear of aging. “It’s all about my fear of death,” explains Gregory, “but not just for myself. Unsurprisingly, then, the 13 songs that make up this self-titled third full-length are riddled with ruminations on life coming to an end. ![]() But little by little, it got worse and worse until it was overbearing and all-consuming. They’d already written that record, though, and besides, Gregory’s fixation with death hadn’t quite reached such debilitating proportions by that point. That incident occurred in November 2018, right before the band – now completed by drummer Daniel Gorham and bassist Adam Dasilva – recorded their second album, 2019’s Cosmic Thrill Seekers. The van looked like none of us should have survived it. One thing led to another and we slid off the road into a snow plough. ![]() We’d driven through blizzards a million times before being from New York, so we just kept going and that was not the right idea – it was a 12-hour drive and everyone was really tired. We were driving home from a tour and we just wanted to get home really bad. “You were afraid of it beforehand,” chimes in guitarist Cameron Handford, “and then we actually almost died. I actually went to a psychiatric hospital for a month in the middle of writing this record because of it.” “I know being scared of dying isn’t irrational, but I had an irrational fear of it to a non-functional point. “I was really scared of dying for some reason,” he remembers. So extreme, in fact, that when Prince Daddy & The Hyena were in the middle of making this third full-length, the vocalist/guitarist of the Albany, NY band had to take some time out from, well, everything. Yet for Kory Gregory, that fear was extreme. Whether it’s the idea of your own impending doom that’s rattling around your skull or the mortality of those close to you, such thoughts are part of the curse of human consciousness. It’s a very natural human phenomenon to be scared of death.
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