‘Mind Palace,’ the new album from acoustic punk road scholar Duane Regretzky, is out now on High End Denim Records, and it arrives with 14 tracks of vaudevillian mania, punk anthems, heartfelt protest songs, and acoustic ballads that occasionally explode into skate punk or power metal riffage without a moment’s warning.
Second single “Cannibal Integrity” lands as one of the record’s sharpest moments, a full-throttle dive into the threat of generative AI art. Regretzky doesn’t hedge. “Fuck generative AI. Don’t use it to make art. It’s a pointless drain on our planet’s finite resources. It looks dumb and homogenized. It steals real life income from human artists.” That directness runs through everything he does, and it’s a large part of what makes him so compelling.
‘Mind Palace’ is the clearest expression yet of Regretzky’s range and versatility. The record free falls through culinary calamities and full-band punk anthems with equal comfort, held together by sincere, thoughtful songwriting that sits comfortably alongside the likes of Jeff Rosenstock and SNFU. It’s a wild, funny, occasionally furious record from an artist who earns every bit of the chaos he creates.