- Good English
- 2026
Julian McCamman is getting a fresh start. Last summer, just a year after his band Blood released their debut studio album Loving You Backwards, the Philly-via-Austin rockers suddenly called it quits. "Blood began with a fervent need to pronounce a particular love and sensitivity with the rage filled defense I felt it deserved," frontman Tim O’Brien wrote in their breakup announcement. "The music and performance at its best was always a call to rouse ourselves and others to the present, to heighten life for a moment, to expand the potential for a life more deeply felt outside of the show."
But McCamman, driven by an itch to make something more personal to himself, wasn’t about stay outside of the show for long. Just a week before Loving You Backwards’ release, McCamman had quietly shared Sprain, his first full-length project under the moniker Victoryland. Though its personnel has some overlap with his Blood bandmates, Sprain was recorded on an 8-track with McCamman at the helm. A scrappy, minimally produced collection of straightforward indie rock, it centered McCamman's songwriting, which typically employs power-pop-informed hooks and irreverent lyrics. On Victoryland’s label debut My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It, out this Friday on Good English, McCamman retains that homespun charm while expanding on his craft and ultimately delivering on a much larger scale.
On My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It, Victoryland reminds me a lot of the ramshackle avant-pop Nate Amos nearly perfected on This Is Lorelei’s 2024 breakthrough Box For Buddy, Box For Star (though I tend to trace those origins back to freak-folk records like Of Montreal’s Cherry Peel or Animal Collective’s Feels). But My Heart Is A Room, while still in line with the lightly-experimental spirit of those off-kilter forebears, leans more into their straightforward pop side. Victoryland songs like “No Cameras” and “I got god” are laced with instantly-memorable hooks and given a lightly psychedelic touch, and across the album, acoustic and electric guitars play in tandem with tinny synths and jangling pianos. It acts as a surprisingly cohesive scrapbook of sounds from seemingly every corner of the indie pop umbrella.
McCamman made My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It after the dissolution of Blood, though he returned to Loving You Backwards producer Dan Howard’s Brooklyn studio. Somewhere along the way, McCamman decided to ditch Philly and move to Brooklyn himself, where he recorded the My Heart Is A Room demos. Each track of the final project, McCamman claims, contains at least a bit of its corresponding demo recording, although those moments can be difficult to pinpoint exactly. That blurred line might be My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras On’s biggest strength: A seamless blend of amateur and professional that grants an immediate intimacy to its gentler moments, in turn leaving room for its big, sweeping resolutions — like the truly triumphant album closer “I’ll Show You Mine” — to really grab hold.
My Heart Is A Room bears an undeniable, infectious whimsy and romance even while grounding itself in sobering realizations like the impermanence of seemingly infinite relationships, how minor setbacks can open a chasm of despair, and the fact that building meaningful connections takes both effort and emotional intelligence. "I got god," for example, isn’t rooted in any deity as much as it finds peace in the nature of life’s inherent instability: "And if this is the loneliest you've felt, then, then, then — buckle up," McCamman shouts over arpeggiated keys, but that warning doesn’t seem to come from a place of total despondency. In the context of My Heart Is A Room, it feels more like a caution against allowing yourself to slip into a self-induced isolation — a habit with which McCamman seems to have first hand experience. "Oh, I’ll dance like I'm your witness," he howls from beneath a disco ball glimmer on "You Were Solved," and suddenly "dancing like nobody’s watching" becomes not just a mode of catharsis, but an antidote to that very loneliness.
My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It treats relationships of all kinds with a nuanced sort of preciousness; true human connection needs initiative in order to form and time in order to flourish, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it's scarce or unreachable. The key to this type of connection, McCamman seems to argue, is authentic vulnerability with no expectation of anything in return. Your heart must be pure even when — especially when — the cameras are off.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Megadeth's Megadeth
• Ari Lennox's Vacancy
• Lucinda Williams' World's Gone Wrong
• Roc Marciano's 656
• The Damned's Not Like Everybody Else
• The Format's Boycott Heaven
• Louis Tomlinson's How Did I Get Here?
• Poppy's Empty Hands
• MIKA's Hyperlove
• Van Morrison's Somebody Tried To Sell Me A Bridge
• PVA's No More Like This
• Dani Larkin's Next Of Kin
• Searows' Death In The Business Of Whaling
• Jo Passed's Away
• Chris Garneau's In Reverse
• Greg Weeks' If The Sun Dies
• Tom Hamilton's I’m Your Vampire
• Ski Team's Burnout/Boys
• Langkamer's No
• Cam Kahin’s CHUG
• JB Dunckel's Paranormal Music Chamber
• Craven Faults' Sidings
• Katie Tupper's Greyhound
• Agnes' BEAUTIFUL MADNESS
• Erik Hall's Solo Three
• YĪN YĪN's Yatta!
• XG's The Core
• Backengrillen's Backengrillen
• Julian Lage's Scenes From Above
• Hot Face's Automated Response
• reggie's UNDRA
• ROCKY & THE SWEDEN's Punks Pot Head
• COLOSSAL RAINS' Feral Sorrow
• New Miserable Experience's Gild The Lily
• Ella Red’s IT’S NOT REAL
• Gesaffelstein's Enter The Gamma Live Album
• Perfect Person's Perfect Person
• .idk.'s Even The Devil Smiles
• Zoo's LUMANISTA (Part 1)
• TEXTURE’s Genotype
• T. Gold's Life Is A Wonder And It's Cruel
• Vanishment's And Now We Die
• David Forman's Who You Been Talking To
• Camper's Campilation
• Bushy B's Lifestyle
• Cat Power's Redux EP
• Draag's Miracle Drug EP
• Maria Somerville's Luster (Remixes) EP
• Madra Salach's It’s A Hell Of An Age EP
• Pelican's Ascending EP
• Hudson Westbrook's Exclusive EP
• Rocky Votolato’s Makers (20th Anniversary Deluxe)
• The Power Station's The Power Station (40th Anniversary Edition)
• Various Artists' Keep Me In Your Heart: The Songs Of Warren Zevon
