Stardeath And White Dwarfs

Stardeath and White Dwarfs emerged from Oklahoma City in 2004 as a psychedelic rock outfit intent on testing the outer edges of the form, much as the Flaming Lips had done before them. The group comprises Dennis Coyne, nephew of the Lips’ Wayne Coyne, together with Casey Joseph, Matt Ducksworth, and Ford Chastain. Their recordings fuse spacy pop and gauzy atmospherics with a saturated, lo-fi crunch that occasionally recalls the early David Bowie catalog refracted through blown-out, hallucinatory production.

The band’s first outing arrived in 2005 as the EP That’s Cool. A deal with Warner Bros. followed, yielding the full-length debut The Birth in 2009. Frequent partnerships with the Flaming Lips ensued, encompassing the latter’s reinterpretation of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and the 2012 project Playing Hide and Seek with the Ghosts of Dawn, itself a reworking of King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King. After aligning with Federal Prism, the imprint run by TV on the Radio’s David Sitek, the quartet issued its second album, Wastoid, in 2014.