ROBERT FRANCIS PHANTASMAGORIA
Robert Francis is excited to announce the new album Phantasmagoria, due out March 27th via Aeronaut Records. Francis began working on the songs for his first new LP in six years in early 2025, impelled by an artistically productive 2024 that saw the talented songwriter and producer open up his home and studio in an equine community set against the San Gabriel mountains as a hideout to prestigious musicians. Francis worked with the likes of Daniel Caesar to record "Son of Spergy" with a revolving cast including Tyler The Creator and Mustafa The Poet, and among other exciting projects, also produced Grammy Award winner Sierra Ferrell's duet with SoCal surf-punk heartthrob Brooks Nielsen, "Without Eyes.”
The experience invigorated Francis, and with the new year he began to focus on his own songs, only to have the record that would become Phantasmatoria’s trajectory irrevocably altered just as soon as he began. On January 7th, 2025, the Palisades Fire ripped through the west side of Los Angeles, while the 800-acre Hurst Fire burned just south of his home studio. Francis evacuated his mother who lived just south, moving her to his sister’s house in Altadena. That night, the Eaton Fire erupted, and so he helped his family evacuate from the path of harm for a second time in the same day. While his sister Juliette's house survived, their neighborhood was crushed. Black soot, lead, and cyanide contaminated their home. After their children's school burned down, Juliette and her husband Joachim moved to the East Coast. Her collection of analog synthesizers—a Prophet 5 and Moog Voyager among them—wound up in Francis's studio. These instruments, born from devastation, became the beating heart of the new album and the first single shared today, "State Line".
Listen to lead single “State Line”: [SMART LINK] From the new album Phantasmagoria out March 27th via Aeronaut Records (Pre-Order)
“State Line”, Francis says, is about and inspired by "pieces of an epistolary dialogue with my son. Memories in the rearview, obscured by a hot road mirage. The State Line as a symbol of freedom, but not without the loss of naiveté. Seismic shifts beneath all things, and changes I wish I'd welcomed sooner." The song was written on a 1920s Leedy Marimba and a Prophet 5.
"I've always been synth-obsessed, but they never fit the folk narrative," explains Francis when speaking about the genesis of Phantasmagoria. Recording the synthesizers to tape revealed something magical. "Analog gear is alive—physical, tangible. We'd track the synths to 2-inch tape along with the reverbs and delays. You can hear the tape interpreting the synth in real time, as if deciding what to do with it.”
Francis played most instruments himself: drums, bass, guitar, banjo, mandolin, organ, piano, synthesizer, flute, percussion, harpsichord, and tubular bells. Recording mostly solo proved grueling, but Francis had engineering partner Eric Fuller there to spearhead the technical side and keep things moving. "Eric has a wondrous mind and an even better work ethic," Francis notes. "Some days you're exhausted, mentally and physically. But Eric always went the extra mile. That kept me bringing my best."
The result defied Francis's folk-driven catalog. Ethereal synthesizers pan across the stereo field. Tight kick drums meet woody open snares. Deliberately pedestrian thumping bass lines. Acoustic guitars are painstakingly doubled, sometimes tripled. Atonal vocoders blend with close-mic'd electric guitars. Songs shift through multiple time signatures—7/4 to 5/4, 6/3 to 3/3—all in one piece. "These were mental exercises that excited me,” says Francis. “Sometimes I wasn't sure I could pull it off. But I put my head down and took it one note at a time."
"My entire life, managers and labels whispered about self-editing and simplification. They warned against adding too much, said it would obscure the song. This time, I ignored all that. What happens if I explore every idea, chase every melody, turn over every stone? Let's make a maximalist record."
Aeronaut Records' John Mastro notes the album shares similarities with Francis's debut One By One, recorded when he was eighteen. "It's true what they say—you have your whole life to write your first album,” says Mastro, “Your sophomore has just a few months." Phantasmagoria allowed Robert the time to explore once again. Francis notes drawing inspiration from famed audio engineer George Massenburg's interview about recording Little Feat's "Long Distance Love." "They never stopped until they got it right. If it meant staying up for days, then so be it. That became my mantra."
Phantasmagoria will be released on March 27th via Aeronaut Records.