News / Records

Chad Matheny, also known as Emperor X, has shared the first single, an unsubtle jab at Western politicking, from the upcoming Unified Field album, out on June 26 on Bar/None.

The record was written in Cleveland, OH and primarily recorded in Kyiv, Ukraine.

In Matheny's own words:

Towards the end of 2025, I saw a news report about a train in Ukraine on one of the lines I used often when I was there being bombed, and it made me so mad. I knew that I had to finish this album there with the people I had come to call friends over the years. Staying in Berlin would have been much easier logistically, but the term I used at the time was that it felt like an ‘aesthetic emergency’ that I finish Unified Field in Ukraine. I had a strong instinct that the record would come out better, and be more meaningful, if I did it with my friends who also lived their lives under fire. I would much rather spend money renting a studio space in Kremenchuk than Kreuzberg or Brooklyn, you know? They need our support, they have really beautiful spaces and talented folks who are stuck & unable to leave.

“One night in Nov. 2025 as I arrived for a recording session in Kharkiv (Ukraine's second largest city), several Shahed drones hit nearby in a ten-minute wave of percussive impacts. Air defense knocked down most of them, but a few snuck through. One hit a nearby power station. Another hit an apartment tower about twenty blocks northeast. There were yellow flashes in the sky, and two deafening booms that I will never forget. Four people were killed.

While tragedy defines the setting, the record also explores the reality of daily life.

Life continues. They still have shows, they still make records, they still go to work, they still meet at cafes, they still love and have babies and gossip and experience absurd situations to which wry laughter is the only rational response.