Lay Llamas isn’t a band so much as an open portal. Founded in 2012 by Sicilian composer and musicologist Nicola Giunta, the project shifts shape constantly, collaborators in, collaborators out, but always orbiting the same psychedelic and slightly ritualistic core.
Upcoming album ‘Time, Islands And Thresholds’ promises to lean into dub echo, esoteric exotica, cosmic drift and imagined folklore. It’s newly released lead single, ‘Mystical Journey’, is all of this headiness, settling into a lilting, mantric form of psych rock transcendence.
Giunta describes the accompanying video as an attempt to mirror revelatory states of consciousness, calling it “an inner voyage through images of the subconscious… nightmares, dreams, visions and memories that cathartically lead to final purification through a wild dance”.
That might sound lofty on paper, but in practice it does hit somewhere between cosmic dub meditation and psych rock transcendance. Lay Llamas have been refining this language for over a decade now and this feels like it is reaching a particularly lucid state.
🎧 Watch the video for ‘Mystical Journey’ below