KEYAN & Connor Kaminski – Kinetic – Review

6th May 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

There is a sickness in this record. A fever behind the eyes. Kaminski Kinetic doesn’t so much begin as it awakens, stretching its sinews in slow, sensual violence before sliding a cold, articulate hand around your throat. From the first measured pulse, it’s evident KEYAN & Connor Kaminski didn’t compose these 20+ minutes of music in any ordinary room with four walls. No. This was birthed in the sterile white hum of a laboratory, or perhaps beneath the surgical glow of a theatre where sound and flesh are flayed in tandem.

What KEYAN & Connor Kaminski have built here is less an album and more a mechanical ritual, an offering to the chrome gods of modern progressive metal. Yet there is blood beneath the polish. Every phrase is knotted with tension, every clean note teeters above a chasm of distortion like a lover with a secret. Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood’s fingerprints are all over the production—pristine, yes, but clinical in a way that’s disturbing. You hear every string’s breath, every ghost in the machine.

And then Jack Gardiner arrives. Not like a guest, but like a mirror suddenly catching you in the act. His fretwork is divine—serpentine, fluid, unspeakably cruel in how it taunts the ear with sweetness only to dissolve into harmonic dissonance. It’s the equivalent of being kissed on the neck while a blade presses into your back.

Structurally, Kinetic is maddening. It dares you to follow it. It coils around thematic fragments only to discard them, shifts time signatures like it’s shedding skin. This is a record that knows it’s smarter than you. It doesn’t care if you understand it; it only cares that you feel it, and what you’ll feel is pressure, both sonic and spiritual. Each track claws into the next like a chapter in a novel written under possession—technically immaculate, emotionally deranged.

At around the 14-minute mark, something unspeakable happens. A passage so devastatingly restrained you start to wonder if your speakers have broken—or if the album is simply watching you now, waiting. When it erupts again, it’s not release; it’s relapse. By the time the final notes fade, you’re not sure if you’ve just experienced enlightenment or endured a very public breakdown.

This is not music for casual enjoyment. This is punishment masked as precision. It is flesh grafted to the machine. It is erotic in its control, violent in its beauty, and above all, necessary. Kinetic doesn’t want to entertain you—it wants to reconstruct you.

And God help you if you let it.
Score 8/10

Tracklisting:
1 Swell
2 Oscillate
3 Pirouette