It wasn’t the acid trip four years ago that messed Kory Gregory up. The acid trip was basically fine. It was the post-acid haze that sent him spiraling. The cogs were still turning in his brain for days, then weeks, then months afterwards. “It was just me constantly thinking about the rhyme or reason — what causes what,” he says over the phone from a park by his home just outside of Albany, New York, as he sips on a Twisted Tea. “During the trip, you can convince yourself to give it however many hours and it'll be gone. But when two weeks go by and you're still having little panic attacks about it. It starts to weigh on your mind: Did I permanently pollute my thought process and my appreciation and excitement for life?

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He didn’t. But listening to “I Lost My Life,” the first song on punk band Prince Daddy & The Hyena’s sprawling new album Cosmic Thrill Seekers, you wouldn’t know it. “Everything will be alright / If you shake the end of the world vibes,” he screams over an acoustic guitar. “The shit around me's got me tight / I hope I’m coming down ​tonight.”

Cosmic Thrill Seekers, Prince Daddy & The Hyena’s second full-length, is, by Gregory’s own admission, a “selfish” record. It details the cyclical nature of his mental states, from excitable ecstasy to nervous fear to self-destructive disaster. He started writing the record in a closet in his bedroom in 2015, in the midst of his after-trip existential crisis, as soon as he realized that his psychology mirrored parts of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. So, it’s a concept album split into three: The Heart, The Brain, and The Roar. The whole thing is premiering below — in the three parts that Gregory thought it up — ahead of its release this Friday via Counter Intuitive Records.

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Gregory makes sure to call it “selfish” not just because the songs are introspective — “Lauren (Track 2)” is a love song more about Gregory’s thoughts than Lauren herself — but because it helps him to remember the temporary nature of his emotions. His raspy, bloodied voice and the shamelessly anthemic pop-punk melodies hold the record together, but there are intentional shifts in tone and tenor. “I’m thinking a fireplace and a small dog / Maybe some dark green and dark purple walls,” he sings, dreaming up an idyll on “Cosmic Thrill Seeking Forever,” the last song on The Brain, “but it’s not safe to think about forever…” It’s a concept album, so that obviously opens up into some brilliantly ostentatious, duelling guitars and, on Gregory’s lyric sheet, an all-caps “...TO BE CONTINUED.” It shuts down before “Slip” and “The Prototype of The Ultimate Lifeform” lead into “Breather,” the nerviest song on the record: “If I make it home / I might not step foot outside again.” In that context, the relative release of the third section, in which Gregory can’t says yes to everything in an attempt to drown his fears, is a relief. On “Klonopin,” he’s brief: “Someone get fucked up with me in the day time.”

In short, Cosmic Thrill Seekers is a punk concept album from the mind of a guy who cites Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor, Green Day’s American Idiot, and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade as three of his primary inspirations for a narrative arc. Or, as Gregory succinctly puts it, this is “Disney-punk.” That’s how he described it first: “We just want to make it sound like the soundtrack to a Disney film played by a punk rock band. I think we did that.”

Listen to Cosmic Thrill Seekers in full below and read our interview with Gregory after the jump.

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You’ve said that you saw the parallels between The Wizard of Oz and your mental state. Did you start writing the record as soon as you noticed that?

That realization is what kickstarted me writing the record. I'm an obsession-driven songwriter; I can't really write songs unless I have a specific destination for them. So, I kind of have to conceptualize the bigger picture before I start to write songs.

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Did you know straight away that you wanted this to come out as a three-part album?

By the time I started writing the record, yeah. The first couple of months of writing the record was really just me organizing my thoughts and just conceptualizing it, and by the time I actually started writing songs, I definitely had a clear outline of where I wanted it to go and how I wanted it to be told — how I wanted to be organized within the album.

Do you remember what the three songs were?

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“I Lost My Life,” the first song, was written so long ago. That song specifically deals with the catalyst for me writing this record, which was a bad acid trip I had. Honestly, the first three songs written are the first three songs on the record. I kind of wrote them in chronological order.

What was so bad about that trip?



The acid trip itself wasn't that bad. It was the days and weeks and months following the acid trip. I guess I just had some realizations that I didn't want to have, and my outlook changed in a way that I didn't really want it to change. It felt permanent. It got me in this snowball effect of obsessing over my mental health and my brain's wellbeing.

I know it sounds cliche, but writing this record was a way for me to have everything on paper and have everything organized. I can just look at this little blueprint I left myself with the record.