Lopez Island–Brighton synth-pop duo Disaster Fantasy have released their new EP The Hourglass, with the project arriving in full on April 3rd and expanding the world first teased by its title track.
At the centre of the record sits the title track ‘The Hourglass’, a brooding, slow-burning synthesis of atmosphere and tension that sets the tone for everything that follows. The track moves like a drifting transmission from another place, its pulse steady but uneasy, built on a layered electronic foundation where lo-fi textures, submerged basslines, and spectral synths continually shift shape.
Rather than relying on immediate hooks, the song unfolds with patience. Its central motif evolves almost imperceptibly, pulling the listener deeper into a soundscape where distant, reverb-soaked guitars flicker at the edges and vocal harmonies blur into the haze. The effect is immersive and disorienting in equal measure: a track that feels less “written” than slowly revealed.
That sense of controlled unease defines the EP as a whole.
Across The Hourglass, Disaster Fantasy construct a conceptual framework that feels as cinematic as it does musical. Vocalist Ryann Donnelly describes the record as a self-contained world, one orbiting a fictional Los Angeles bar called The Hourglass, where every song follows characters bound by their own fractured relationship to time.
“This will be the most conceptually-driven thing we’ve released,” Donnelly explains. “The stories in the songs are told from the perspective of characters who have some connection to a fictional bar in Los Angeles called The Hourglass.”
The setting evokes a Lynchian strangeness, recalling the uneasy dream logic of Twin Peaks and the surreal, fractured identity play of Mulholland Drive—a space where reality feels slightly out of joint and meaning is always just out of reach.
But beneath the noir atmosphere and cinematic framing lies a more personal thread: anxiety around time itself.
“It’s a fairly direct metaphor for time—specifically, the fear of time running out,” Donnelly says. “Every character in these songs has an anxious relationship to time. In reality, this was something I was dealing with in the writing of the words and melodies.”
That tension is mirrored in the music’s construction. The EP’s arrangements feel constantly in motion, as though resisting stasis. Subtle shifts in rhythm, harmonic turns that appear and dissolve, and carefully layered synth textures create a sensation of instability, like something always slipping just beyond control.
Disaster Fantasy’s sonic identity remains rooted in their long-standing fascination with synth-driven aesthetics, but The Hourglass pushes further into shadowed territory. The duo (Donnelly and multi-instrumentalist Byron Kalet) continue to draw on a wide spectrum of influences, from the precision of Kraftwerk and the melodic melancholy of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, to the pop immediacy of Robyn, the cool post-punk sheen of Blondie, and the propulsive energy of LCD Soundsystem.
Formed between Lopez Island and Brighton, the pair, both veterans of the darker edges of experimental and alternative scenes, have steadily built a reputation for blending disco, experimental pop, and atmospheric electronics into something singular. Donnelly’s background with Schoolyard Heroes and Kalet’s work through Journal of Popular Noise and Popular Noise Records inform a sensibility that is both cinematic and grounded in underground club energy.
With The Hourglass, Disaster Fantasy don’t just extend their sound – they construct a fully realised narrative environment, one where every track feels like a scene, every synth line like a flicker of memory, and time itself becomes the central character.
The Hourglass is out now.
