Chris Cohen with The Pxrtals

Chris Cohen’s songs initially sound easy. They’re each tiny jewels that unfurl at a leisurely pace, but dig a little deeper and you’ll reach a melancholy core. His previous albums — 2012’s Overgrown Path, 2016’s As If Apart and 2019’s Self Titled — were built from lush, blurry tracks that embedded themselves in your subconscious, like they’d always been there.

Paint a Room (out July 12, 2024) is his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen’s meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. This is Cohen communicating with friends not only through his deep understanding of groove, harmony, and hook but also with his listeners through songs that croon of our uneasy little era.

About The Pxrtals

Imagine the sound of Roy Orbison’s and Grace Slick’s spirits trekking through an ageless forest soundtracked in 60s’ psychedelic, 90s’ alternative and future electronic, and you will find The Pxrtals…

Pronounced “portals,” the ‘x’ denotes the band’s mysterious sound across the musical spectrum, where each song brings you through different portals: spanning explorations into incendiary, midnite rock n' roll, to enigmatic electronica, to intimately delicate early-morning folk, The Pxrtals aim to inspire and entertain with their spacetime / nature-oriented music through minimal, meditative quietudes to mind-bending psychedelic bursts.