Longboat and the Absurd Intelligence of His Latest Album

With The Merry Blacksmith’s Song Bucket, Longboat continues to operate in a space where satire, science fiction, and unsettling honesty overlap. The project, led by Igor Keller, arrives as a direct creative continuation of Word Gets Around, recorded soon after that release while the momentum was still alive. However, this album pushes further.

“There’s a continuation of the short story idea,” Keller explains. “But this time, there’s a stronger sci-fi thread running through it.” That shift is audible throughout The Merry Blacksmith’s Song Bucket, which treats each song  like a self-contained narrative — sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing, often both at once.

The latest album of Longboat  is fascinated with human dullness, emotional avoidance, and technological fantasy. Songs move between social commentary and the most absurd storytelling, using exaggeration as a tool. In one moment, Keller criticizes the modern appetite for conformity and empty trends; in another, he imagines a world where intimacy is outsourced to machines, exposing loneliness through satire instead of sentimentality.

Moreover, the album’s recurring characters often feel overwhelmed, disengaged, or quietly furious. There’s a persistent sense of unease — not explosive despair, but the slower erosion that comes from routine, apathy, and social noise. Lines about “vapid rules,” “innocuous blobs,” and a “tiresome age slowly dawning” read like observations from someone watching the world drift into comfortable numbness.

In the album we can also notice childhood memories and imagination appear through surreal storytelling, blending innocence with sudden violence. What begins as a familiar coming-of-age fantasy, a child dreaming of flight, spirals into something darker and irreversible. These moments underline one of the album’s central concerns: curiosity, fantasy, and danger often exist side by side.

Ultimately, The Merry Blacksmith’s Song Bucket reinforces what Longboat does best. It treats songwriting as speculative fiction, humor as critique, and discomfort as a form of honesty. The album invites listeners to sit with strange ideas, “laugh” at unsettling truths, and recognize themselves somewhere in the absurdity.