Unlettered Releases New Single

On June 26, Unlettered, the innovative post-punk project spearheaded by multi-instrumentalist Mike Knowlton, will release their anticipated new album Devil’s Bowl (pre-order). Today the band is excited to share the album’s final pre-release single “Bric-A-Brac” a sharp examination of commodification, identity, and information overload in the modern age, alongside an interactive music video created by the band. The song debuted at Rock and Roll Globe and is on all streaming platforms for playlist consideration.

On the song, the band’s Mike Knowlton shares:

Bric-A-Brac reflects a culture where meaning is endlessly repackaged and stripped for parts. In a landscape saturated with branding, performance, and distraction, the song examines how people themselves become commodified, shaped, managed, and quietly owned by systems far larger than themselves. What remains is noise masquerading as connection.

On the video, Knowlton adds:

This interactive video places the viewer inside a swirling storm where lyric fragments accumulate in real time with the music, and allows the viewer to add their own gravity, placing personal phrases briefly into orbit before they drift back into the field. We thought this connected well to the song’s examination of how individual meaning dissolves into a system that just keeps generating more noise.

Unlettered, the post-punk studio project led by Mike Knowlton (Gapeseed, Poem Rocket), has always worked in tension: guitars detuned until they shimmer and scrape, basslines that pulse like a distant warning system, rhythms that blur the line between mechanical and human. On Devil’s Bowl, that pressure extends beyond the self. It doesn’t build, it spreads.

This record turns its attention outward, toward a culture saturated in spectacle, toward systems that feel simultaneously fragile and immovable. Identity flickers between authenticity and performance. Assurance masquerades as knowledge. The public square swells with volume, but meaning slips through the cracks. The songs move like transmissions from a landscape where consensus has eroded and the ground itself feels provisional.

Musically, Devil’s Bowl tightens the screws. Guitars grind and recoil. Bass carries the melodic weight like a slow-moving storm front. Vocals, written and performed by Knowlton alongside co-lyricist Kelly Grimm, shift between incantation and observation, rarely offering comfort, never offering easy resolution. On two tracks, Peter Gordon, Knowlton’s longtime bandmate in Gapeseed and Poem Rocket, plays drums, reconnecting the present tense of Unlettered with the physical momentum of its past.

This is not a protest record, though it vibrates with unrest. It is not a manifesto, though it circles questions of power, performance, and collapse. It is not a diagnosis — more like a fever reading.

If Five Mile Point traced personal transition, loss, memory, the weight of what lingers, then Devil’s Bowl widens the aperture. The grief turns structural. The introspection turns civic. The tension that defined earlier work hasn’t dissipated, it has scaled up, pressing against something larger than the self.

Stand in the bowl long enough and the air begins to vibrate. Whether that vibration signals collapse or transformation is left unresolved.