The Psychedelic Baby: Simulating by The Brahmankind

Perhaps it’s my age, but when I listen to The Brahmankind, I can’t help but think psychedelic. I grew up on the psychedelic music of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and this recording, to me, is what you’d get if rock and psychedelic music had a baby — and the baby grew up to be this.

Simulating is the debut EP from this Vancouver band — four songs, twenty-one minutes, self-produced in their own studio and released August 20th. The core here is Dominik — guitars and vocals — and Jaya on keyboards and vocals, with Lyle and Sanish supplying the bass and drums that give the record its legs. And I’ll say honestly: it took me quite a few listens to locate myself inside this music, to get beyond the raw power and sensation, which is immediately obvious. That’s not a complaint. The records I grew up on demanded the same thing.

The EP is built like a record in the old sense — two sides. Side A: “Leo with Gun” into “Streets Woman.” Side B: “Weird Chemicals” into “Simulation IV.” Each side opens with a takeover and closes with something long and lonely, and the mastering quietly agrees: loud songs against the ceiling, lonely songs with air. It’s one of those invisible elements — you’d never name it, but you feel it holding the record together.

One more thing before the songs themselves: every track here opens and closes with place — not musical bookends but settings, scenes, moods. Geese overhead. Footsteps on a stairway. The click of a television. Of course every record fades in and out of silence — although these fades feel less like engineering and more like stage curtains. It’s the EP’s connective tissue, and it might be my favorite craft decision on the whole record.

“Leo with Gun”

“Leo with Gun” is quite overwhelming, and it takes real emotional fortitude to get through — especially with the beautifully animated video, which comes with a warning worth heeding, and which to me only amplifies the depth and meaning of the music. Those geese at the top (and the bottom — they bookend the song) are an important magic element. But zero in on the harmony and you’ll find the song’s psychology written in the chords. It opens on a sunny, friendly C-to-F loop — the sound of a nice neighborhood — except the turnaround already has a chromatic worm in the apple. The verses march on a stubborn two-chord treadmill, Leo’s circular self-justifying logic set to music. And when the chorus arrives at “Everyone here obey me / Just goddamm obey me,” the whole band lurches up by a single semitone — the exact musical distance of a smile dropping. By my count the song touches ten of the twelve possible chord roots. It’s very modernistic writing, even a little bit atonal in flashes, and it’s never off-putting — it’s a vitally important part of the texture.

“Streets Woman”

“Streets Woman” is beautifully moody, with an undeniable, engaging layer of blues running through it — though this is not blues music by any stretch of the imagination. A solid blues shuffle carries it all the way through, and the feel is perfect for the song. It’s haunting and lonely and incredibly powerful at once. The opening is pure theater of the ordinary: footsteps up a staircase, a whistle, something heavy landing on the bed, a door — and underneath it the natural hum of pickups and amp, played like an instrument. I’m particularly drawn to the Hammond-organ-sounding break in the middle — not a real Hammond, but a modern retelling of that sound, which I cannot resist. And listen for the match: when the lyric says “I lit a cigarette,” a real match strikes, close-mic’d — Foley as songwriting. Jaya’s rendition gives the song incredible power, storytelling, and genuine reality, over a lyric so spare — barely sixteen lines — that the arrangement does the narrating. The instrumental buildup of the coda is beautifully terraced: it grows in steps, powerfully, and reaches its very natural conclusion. You can literally watch it happen on a loudness graph, but you don’t need one. Your body does the measuring.

“Weird Chemicals”

“Weird Chemicals” announces itself with a television clicking on — and ends when someone shuts it off. In between, it’s very fast and driving, with beautiful contrast where it falls into a seeming half-time and then snaps back: the rhythmic equivalent of what weird chemicals will do to you, moving you from one space to another seamlessly and without irony. That, to me, is exactly what psychedelic music is for. And every so often a megaphone barks through the mix — because apparently when the chemicals take over, they come with their own PA system. It’s also the one track that never lets up — the mix starts loud and stays loud, bright and fuzzed to saturation, which is precisely right for a song about a chain reaction you can’t opt out of. Great guitar work throughout, and fabulous drumming and bass playing from Sanish and Lyle, giving the song incredible energy and direction — right up to the classic ending: the build, and the stumble.

“Simulation IV”

“Simulation IV” is the most intriguing and most challenging thing here. To me it’s a weird and wild “Bohemian Rhapsody” kind of song — without any of the sentimentality. Seven minutes, built in great uneven blocks: an acoustic dawn, a music box “in a peculiar key,” a cold computer voice announcing a “cognitive deviation,” an operatic flight over the lunar plains, a breakdown into scat and childlike babble, and finally a slow processional toward a throne of bones and sand. The megaphone returns, too — the last thread of the public world woven into the private collapse. And the mix goes somewhere the rest of the record never does — down: more than half the sound lives in the bass registers — a monolith, and on this record’s moonscape that word feels right at home. It takes me successfully to the world of lunar dogs and unicorns, and I mean that in the most abstract musical way, without even referring to the lyric. I suppose that’s a type of simulating in and of itself. Jaya’s keyboards sit in a lineage the band wears openly: Marian Varga and Collegium Musicum, Slovak art rock, all Carpathian granite. So while everyone will reach for Bohemian Rhapsody, Bohemia is Czech territory. This music breathes the high mountain air of the Tatras. Call it the old Slovak joke about visitors who don’t know whose mountains they’re standing in: a Czech in the High Tatras.

I won’t go on a philosophical rant about simulations — though in the year 2026, in the world of AI and the general madness taking over the world, it’s almost hard to avoid. Maybe that’s the review: an EP about losing your grip that asks for the one thing the simulation can’t fake — another listen, another honest listen.

Simulating is out now — stream it wherever you listen, or start with the videos above.