Dark City Kings have been shaping their sound in a weathered homestead outside Black Mountain, North Carolina. The six-piece: Colleen Rose, Merlin Armstrong, Kyrie Antoinette, Bayla Ostrich, Craig Rumney, and JP Kennedy, pull from bands like The Waterboys, Blondie, and The Cure, but the results don’t feel secondhand. They’ve built something that leans on new wave’s sharp edges, folk rock’s warmth, and pop’s immediacy, carried forward by their partnership with producer Kevin Moloney, best known for his work with Sinéad O’Connor in the 1980s.
Their new EP Champions of Tomorrow’s Fun opens with the title track, a duet where male and female vocals meet in call-and-response and rise together into a hook that sticks. There’s a touch of country-rock in the rhythm, but the punch is pure pop, written to be shouted back at them from a crowd. The grit of the band playing together keeps it from slipping into gloss.
Atmosphere pivots away from that energy. Female-led vocals pull it into slower territory. Bells mark the space before a guitar enters late, loud in the mix, giving the track a sense of unease. If the first song chases joy, this one lingers on distance and longing.
The two songs land as opposites, but together they frame the band’s approach. Dark City Kings don’t flatten their influences into one lane, they hold tension between uplift and shadow, showing both sides of what their next record Joy Is Defiance might carry.
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