On his third LP, Karma Smile, Coolonaut isn’t chasing relevance—he’s issuing a rebuke. Written and recorded in rural Australia on an analogue 8-track machine, the album fuses mid-to-late ’60s psychedelic mod textures with a worldview that feels brutally contemporary. The result is a record that sounds steeped in another era while staring unflinchingly at this one. Coolonaut began releasing albums in 2024, at a time he describes as the unraveling of comfortable assumptions about universal human rights. Two years and three records in, Karma Smile emerges from a darker headspace. If there’s a defining feature here, it’s moral urgency. Where many modern rock records turn inward, Coolonaut looks outward—angry, disillusioned, and unwilling to separate art from atrocity.
the commitment to analogue recording is more than aesthetic nostalgia. The tape hiss, compressed drums, and warm, slightly overdriven guitars give the album an immediacy that suits its themes. There’s no clinical polish, no digital sheen. Instead, songs feel lived-in, sometimes frayed at the edges, as though captured in the moment rather than perfected in post-production. That discipline mirrors the ethos of ’60s psych and mod without lapsing into imitation. Karma Smile is confrontational. Tracks like “Be On The Right Side” and “The Reckoning” operate as direct moral challenges—calls to accountability in what the artist perceives as an era of normalized brutality and media complicity. The title track, “Karma Smile,” encapsulates the album’s thesis: justice may be delayed, obscured, even mocked—but it remains inevitable. Whether you interpret that karmic balance spiritually or metaphorically, the song plays like a clenched fist wrapped in reverb.
Yet the record isn’t one-note polemic. “Confabulation” and “Boganville” zoom in on local characters with a wry observational touch, grounding the larger outrage in lived detail. “Volvoman” leans into eccentric self-portraiture, suggesting Coolonaut hasn’t abandoned humour or self-awareness. And “Pebble Dash Heaven,” a reflection on childhood in Scotland, provides one of the album’s most disarming moments—nostalgia rendered not as escapism but as contrast to a harsher present. “Into The Sun” and “Rainbow” add a flicker of psychedelic uplift, reminding listeners that ’60s-inspired music carries both protest and possibility in its DNA. But the closer, “I Don’t Need To Apologise,” dispenses with ambiguity. It’s defiant and unapologetic, drawing a line between speaking out and staying silent. In Coolonaut’s world, neutrality is not an option. If the album has a risk, it’s that its intensity may alienate listeners looking for comfort or detachment. But that seems entirely intentional. Karma Smile doesn’t aspire to background listening or festival-ready escapism. It’s a protest record in a time the artist believes has forgotten how to protest. rooted in analogue psychedelia, thematically driven by contemporary outrage, Karma Smile feels less like a retro exercise and more like a transmission—beamed from a 1967 control room into 2026’s moral fog. Coolonaut may reject modern polish, but his message is unmistakably current: if mainstream voices won’t sing about injustice, someone else will.