PROVOKER

By the time Provoker released their 2023 sophomore outing Demon Compass, they were already talking about their next album. The LA synth-pop trio were on a roll, and the songs kept coming. Holed up in an Echo Park attic, frontman Christian Crow Petty began to think of hauntings — him as a specter in his friends’ house, or the apparitions and memories that follow us around. Provoker’s next feat of world-building was underway, with Petty conjuring a landscape full of dead selves, the things we have left behind or dearly wish we could leave behind, all housed in a third album aptly titled Mausoleum.