Kavus Torabi has today dropped his new video titled ‘My Shameful Namesake’, from his upcoming album ‘October By Name’, which releases October 2nd. Jammerzine had a chance to talk with Kavus about his new album and much more in this exclusive interview (video above).
Kavus Torabi’s musical story begins in Tehran, where he was born before moving with his family to Plymouth as a very young child. His early relationship with music was anything but conventional. After discovering the Stray Cats and Brian Setzer as a kid, he picked up the guitar and began developing his own musical instincts, eventually discovering Cardiacs at sixteen and finding a musical universe that seemed to make far more sense to him than the ordinary rules of rock music. His early years with Die Laughing and The Monsoon Bassoon established a pattern that would follow him for decades: curiosity first, categories somewhere much further down the list.
From there, Torabi became one of those musicians whose résumé threatens to require its own filing cabinet. His work with Cardiacs, Guapo, Knifeworld, Gong and The Utopia Strong has allowed him to continually bend psychedelic rock, progressive music, experimental composition and songwriting into increasingly strange and rewarding shapes. His solo work began with Hip To the Jag in 2020 and continued with The Banishing in 2024, while his latest creative chapter brings all of those experiences together in ‘October By Name’, his forthcoming third solo album, due October 2, 2026. It is the kind of career trajectory that makes the phrase “musical polymath” sound less like promotional copy and more like an administrative necessity.
Kavus Torabi has never seemed particularly interested in making music that behaves itself, so it is almost reassuring that ‘My Shameful Namesake’ arrives with the same wonderfully skewed sense of purpose. The song comes from ‘October By Name’, but it feels less like a neat preview of an album and more like an invitation to step sideways into Torabi’s peculiar little corner of the universe. This is psychedelic music without the mandatory incense, progressive rock without the twelve minute ego trip, and art rock that actually remembers that songs are supposed to be fun to listen to.
The music video complements that wonderfully off center spirit by refusing to overexplain itself. Instead of hammering the viewer over the head with an enormous visual concept and a flashing neon sign reading IMPORTANT ART, it allows the atmosphere to do the heavy lifting. The presentation feels strange without becoming self consciously weird, which is a surprisingly difficult trick to pull off. Torabi understands that the best psychedelic imagery does not need to announce that it is psychedelic. It simply makes the familiar feel slightly unreliable.
Musically, ‘My Shameful Namesake’ carries the fingerprints of an artist who has spent decades happily wandering beyond the fence marked NORMAL. The arrangement has a restless quality, moving with the confidence of someone who knows exactly how much eccentricity a song can absorb before it collapses under its own cleverness. Torabi keeps that balance beautifully. There is experimentation here, but it serves the song rather than treating the song as an unfortunate obstacle between two interesting studio ideas.
What makes the video especially effective is how naturally it fits Torabi’s larger creative identity. This is not a musician suddenly discovering psychedelia because someone told him the algorithm likes it. The surrealism feels lived in. Years spent working with Cardiacs, Gong, Knifeworld and The Utopia Strong have clearly given Torabi an enormous musical vocabulary, but ‘My Shameful Namesake’ never sounds like an artist showing off his dictionary. It sounds like someone using all those accumulated experiences to communicate something instinctive and personal.
And that is ultimately what makes ‘My Shameful Namesake’ such an intriguing introduction to ‘October By Name’. Torabi has reached the point where experimentation and accessibility no longer need to fight for territory. The strange bits can be strange, the melodic moments can actually be melodic, and the whole thing can remain emotionally direct without sacrificing any of its personality. In a musical climate where “quirky” is frequently code for putting a kazoo on a synth track and calling it innovation, Torabi offers the considerably more satisfying alternative of genuine imagination.
With ‘October By Name’ arriving October 2, 2026, ‘My Shameful Namesake’ suggests that Kavus Torabi is entering another particularly fertile stretch of his already gloriously unpredictable career. The forthcoming album promises a more luminous and reflective side of his songwriting while retaining the adventurous instincts that have made his work so distinctive. If this video is the doorway, it is probably best not to ask what is on the other side. With Torabi, the fun has always been finding out.
Featured images by Layla Sunshine.
About ‘October By Name’
With its name inspired by a dream, ‘October By Name’ marks out a new chapter in the career of Kavus Torabi. – a psychedelic polymath increasing stretching out his creativity via co-ordinates entirely of his own. This has been a decade so far in which his prolific artistry has only been matched by an equally turbulent period in his personal life. Yet the alchemical charge that has resulted matches the mystical origins of the album’s title with six songs that inhabit a similarly surreal and transcendental landscape. As Kavus reckons “If you can’t trust your subconscious, who can you trust?”
Not merely a more optimistic and beatific sounding record than its cathartic and intense predecessor ‘The Banishing’, ‘October By Name’ sees Kavus evolving as an artist in ways he maybe didn’t even predict himself. Both inspired by his recent work with Gong and Cardiacs, and inhabiting a serious change of modus operandi via his work to date with the improvisational project The Utopia Strong, he created a new method of writing where all styles converge and overlap “As with the first time I heard Cardiacs at the age of sixteen and thinking ‘Oh! You can make stuff like this’, so I had a similar epiphany three decades on.”
Somewhat in the great lineage of British psychedelic pathfinders through the ages (the triumvirate of Syd Barrett, Robyn Hitchcock and Julian Cope being an example) It’s at heart a bittersweet yet optimistic reverie that is pure Torabi. “Perhaps there is no free will and we’re all just playing out the consequences of our genes, insecurities and childhood damage” he reflects on the fundamentals of this song “But I have to believe change is possible because, honestly, what’s the point in anything if it isn’t?”
‘October By Name’ Tracklist
- Signals Shine
- In Her Radiance
- Water Into Wine
- From the Storm
- My Shameful Namesake
- Ancestor’s Song
The openers “Signals Shine” and “In Her Radiance”, meanwhile, in all their luminous glory, see him writing love songs. “No big deal in the wider pantheon of music, but a very big deal to me in that I’ve never written this way before.” he notes. “There’s a different energy in writing romantic verse from the position of a man of my age and experience as opposed to when I was in my twenties. I was far too self-conscious and critical to even attempt anything like this back then and genuinely didn’t feel the pull of the love song like I do now. Writing about being on acid made much more sense”.
Crucial to ‘October By Name’ – which Kavus sees as the third part of a trilogy of solo albums is its very specific way of working. “This wasn’t necessarily a contrived plan when I started making solo records but the model I used on my debut Hip To The Jag; performing and recording everything using only instruments available to me, writing songs of an autobiographical and personal nature and drawing and lettering everything by hand seemed to be the right way to go” he notes “This was a way to put all of myself into something, allowing my shortcomings to define the outcome. I’m not a great drummer or letterer, for example, but the way I play drums or hand-letter, sing, or mix becomes the thing”.
“Increasingly, I’m becoming more solipsistic, going further into my own world creatively. As long as the bubble I’m in keeps giving me songs, I’m OK with that. Honestly, every one I get over the line, that still excites, thrills and engages me is a blessing”.
“I want to make something that feels celestial, otherworldly, mystical and transformative” elucidates Kavus, to which one would tend to say: mission accomplished. .“I think this is probably what I’ve always been trying to do but there was perhaps some insecurity or need to prove something that made me want to be deliberately obtuse or complex when I was younger. I do think music has a – for want of a better word – supernatural quality.”
LINKS:
https://www.instagram.com/kavus_torabi/
https://www.facebook.com/KavusTorabi/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/18EAWcuzknkoGJSH6xjX5j
https://www.youtube.com/@Kavus-Torabi
https://kavustorabi.bandcamp.com/