Who Is The Sky?

You’ve got to hand it to David Byrne. Just when you think the man has settled into his role as rock and roll’s elder statesman of optimistic quirk—all big suits and synchronized choreography—he pulls a move that makes you spit out your coffee. When I saw the producer credit on Who Is The Sky?, my first thought was a genuine, gut-level, “Oh, no.” Kid Harpoon. The sonic architect behind Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus. I braced myself for a disaster, for Byrne’s beautiful, neurotic brain to be sanded down into a focus-grouped, radio-friendly nub.

But I should’ve known better. This isn’t a cash-in; it’s a cage match. Byrne didn’t hire a pop wizard to go pop. He dragged pop into his own weird, twitchy, kaleidoscopic back alley. And to make sure the fight was fair, he brought his own muscle: the searing, off-kilter drumming of Tom Skinner from The Smile and the brass-and-woodwind-wielding brawlers of the Ghost Train Orchestra. The result is a beautiful, glorious mess. It’s the sound of a Top 40 melody trying to escape a collapsing building, and it’s absolutely thrilling.

This slab of vinyl is proof that Byrne is still the undisputed king of riding that razor’s edge. One minute you’re in “Everybody Laughs,” a tune so disarmingly catchy you could hear it in a supermarket, and the next you’re dropped into the existential funhouse of “I Met The Buddha at a Downtown Party.” The grooves are immediate, thanks to Harpoon’s Midas touch, but they’re constantly being poked, prodded, and subverted by Skinner’s polyrhythmic pulse and the Orchestra’s boozy, cinematic swells. It’s accessible, but it refuses to let you get comfortable.

The whole thing feels impossibly personal, like flipping through Byrne’s private journal after the world went sideways. He’s asking the big questions we all mumbled to ourselves during the quiet years, but he’s doing it with a wry smile. A song like “My Apartment Is My Friend” is exactly what it sounds like: a paean to the four walls that became our entire universe, both a prison and a sanctuary. Then you get a track called “Moisturizing Thing,” a deadpan ode to skincare that’s so profoundly mundane it circles all the way back around to being cosmic. Only Byrne could write a song about lotion that makes you contemplate your own mortality while tapping your foot.

And the guests aren’t just window dressing. St. Vincent slides in with her signature serrated-edge guitar and vocals, a familiar and welcome ghost in the machine. Hayley Williams brings a raw, powerful sincerity that cuts right through the art-school irony, grounding the album’s loftier ideas in pure, heartfelt emotion. This isn’t just a record; it’s a conversation between brilliant, disparate minds, brokered by the one man strange enough to get them all in the same room.

Forget what you think you know about late-career albums. Who Is The Sky? isn’t a victory lap. It’s a new beginning. It’s anxious, it’s joyful, it is deeply funny, and it’s layered with more ideas than most bands cram into a whole career. It’s a record that feels essential, not because it has all the answers, but because it has the courage to ask the right, bizarre questions. Spin this thing, and let the glorious, beautiful noise remind you that it’s okay to not know what the hell is going on.

Ah, David Byrne’s “Who Is The Sky?” – a record that feels like an old friend showing up at your door with a bottle of something interesting and stories you haven’t heard before.

Byrne, ever the cerebral wanderer, has crafted something that will speak directly to those who’ve found themselves staring at walls during these strange recent years, wondering what the hell it all means. If you’ve ever questioned your purpose while making coffee or had an existential crisis in the produce aisle, this album is reaching for you.

There’s something gloriously Byrne-ian about creating profound art from pandemic isolation ruminations. While most of us were perfecting sourdough, he was once again reinventing himself, starting with nothing but acoustic sketches and skeletal loops – spiritual cousins to those early Talking Heads demos recorded in lofts when downtown New York was dangerous and dirty and alive.

The collaboration with Kid Harpoon (who helped Harry Styles transcend boy-band purgatory) and the Ghost Train Orchestra creates a sonic landscape that feels both familiar and startlingly new. It is like walking into your childhood home to find all the furniture rearranged in ways that somehow make more sense than before.

I’m particularly drawn to “I Met The Buddha at a Downtown Party” – a title that could only come from Byrne’s delightfully askew worldview. It captures his unique ability to find profound truths in absurd situations, something he is been doing since the days when he was jerking across stages in that oversized suit, creating a new language of performance that we’re still deciphering decades later.

The appearances by Hayley Williams and St. Vincent feel less like guest spots and more like conversations between kindred spirits. There’s a moment in “She Explains Things To Me” where Byrne and St. Vincent’s voices intertwine that reminded me of their magnificent “Love This Giant” collaboration – that same strange alchemy that turns two distinct voices into something otherworldly.

You should know that Byrne once told me (okay, told an interviewer I read) that he writes songs to figure out what he thinks. “Who Is The Sky?” feels like eavesdropping on that process – watching a restless mind wrestle with the big questions while never forgetting to include the humor and groove that makes the wrestling worth doing.

The record belongs on the shelves of anyone who’s ever found beauty in the bizarre, who’s looked at ordinary life and seen the extraordinary lurking just beneath. It is for those who appreciate art that doesn’t explain itself too readily, that requires and rewards multiple listens.

Byrne remains one of our great cultural cartographers, mapping territories between high concept and raw emotion, between experimental and accessible. “Who Is The Sky?” continues that exploration with the curiosity and vitality of an artist who, despite decades of innovation, still approaches each new project with the excitement of someone discovering music for the first time.

Like all his best work, it answers questions you didn’t know you had while leaving you with new ones to consider long after the needle lifts from the vinyl.