Nashville alternative rock act OK Koala have spent the last four-and-a-half years pairing upbeat, driving instrumentation with moody, introspective lyrical content to process hardship and frustration.
Now, with their debut album All Of It, All At Once set to release on January 5, 2023, OK Koala are finally delivering the powerful exhale of breath that they have held for years. OK Koala was originally formed as a solo project of Logan Flanagan, who enlisted a few classmates to help them record their debut EP in 2018 while they studied music production at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. After graduating, Flanagan relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, and continued writing and recording
music for OK Koala in their home studio. Aside from a few standalone singles, none of these songs were immediately released publicly; instead, they were refined over the course of three to four years as the album began to take shape. The final product is a distillation of various ideas that are bolder, more unique, and more mature than anything the band has released to date.
“This album is a look at four years' worth of mind noises brought to life,” Flanagan explains. “The last few years, particularly the isolation of the 2020 lockdown, made me turn inward and write about a lot of very personal topics - current and past friendships, family, long-distance relationships, the transition from youth to adulthood, the changing and chaotic state of the world, and my battle with my own dysfunctional mind. I tried to capture feelings from specific moments in time, and I sat with them for a long time to make those ideas bigger than their origins.”
Stylistically, the album draws from pop-punk, emo, grunge, folk-punk, garage rock, singer- songwriter, hip-hop, and lo-fi, resulting in songs with styles as diverse as the topics they cover.
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