Utopia PKWY: Debut

Release Dates:
07.03.26 - I Knew You Would Be Trouble
08.14.26 - Sleep In Moving Colors
09.25.26 - Nothing Is Missing
11.6.26 - Album

John Beckmann, singer, songwriter, producer, and restless engine behind The Mortal Prophets, takes a sharp left turn into brighter weather with Utopia PKWY, a new project named in reference to Utopia Parkway in Queens, where the great Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell lived and worked.

A thoroughly engaging experiment in post-pop, synth-wave-influenced psychedelia, Utopia PKWY finds Beckmann moving beyond the darker gravitational pull of The Mortal Prophets into something more optimistic, sunny, and wonderfully unstable. The album glows with chrome-colored keyboards, warped hooks, radiant melodies, sci-fi theremins, trippy sitars, and the bleary romance of suburban streets lit by late-afternoon sun. It is pop music viewed through a cracked windshield: melodic, immediate, strange, and full of forward motion.

For this project, Beckmann relinquishes the voice of the songs entirely to Tanner McGraw and Lawson Mars, two young collaborators he affectionately calls the “kids in the neighborhood.” All vocals on the album are performed by McGraw and Mars, whose voices bring a fresh, open-hearted lift to Beckmann’s psychedelic architecture. The phrase fits perfectly: Utopia PKWY sounds like it was smuggled out of some half-remembered Queens street where radios never stopped playing, sprinklers clicked in the heat, and every basement synthesizer, sitar, and space-age oscillator was wired directly into the collective unconscious.

There are echoes here of Syd Barrett’s fragile cosmic mischief and Robert Wyatt’s beautifully bent sense of song, but the album’s deeper patron saint may be Cornell himself: the poet of boxes, birds, maps, star charts, childhood, memory, and impossible little worlds. Beckmann is not staging a revival. He is mutating the inheritance — dressing English psychedelia in reflective glass, cheap stardust, bright suburban color, tripped-out strings, and the feverish pulse of synthetic drums.

Utopia PKWY is Beckmann’s new transmission from the edge of the cosmos: an optimistic post-pop fever dream for anyone who ever suspected that paradise might be hiding in Queens, humming like a theremin, waiting for the right chord change to reveal itself.

TRACKLISTING:
01. I Knew You Were Trouble (Single - July 3)
02. Sleep In Moving Colors (Single - August 14)
03. Nothing Is Missing (Single - September 25)
04. If I Could Steal One More Kiss
05. You Talk Like Every Feeling
06. What Disappears
07. Come In Waves
08. Glitter And Doom
09. Fall Into You
10. Dreaming I'm A Rock Star