David Byrne, of the band Talking Heads, released his first solo album in 7 years on Sept. 5, 2025 in collaboration with Ghost Train Orchestra. When I heard the news I was super excited and started counting down the days until it was released. One of my favorite bands ever is Talking Heads, and I grew up listening to Byrne’s voice all the time. Over the years I fell in love with their creativity, experimentation, and push for weird music in the spotlight of the late seventies and eighties. Albums like Remain in the Light, Stop Making Sense (Live), and Speaking in Tongues changed the way I perceive music and art in general. They made being weird, interesting, and passionate an admirable thing, something that our modern world is slowly losing.
He released his first solo project in 81’ with one of my favorite musicians and composers, Brian Eno. After the Heads started losing momentum and stopped releasing music in 88’, Byrne turned to solo work to keep his passion for music alive. I’ve enjoyed a lot of his early releases quite a bit, especially his work with Eno. It was very different from his stuff with the Heads, but it felt fresh, interesting and very true to who David Byrne was. But while I was listening to his new album Who is the Sky?, I didn’t share this sentiment.
The title Who is the Sky? came from a mishear of the common phrase “Who is this guy?” that Byrne found pretty interesting. “They were saying, “Who’s this guy?” and it came to me as who is the sky? All
right, I got my title.” said Byrne in an interview in August of this year. He didn’t finish the album alone. He got help from New York natives Ghost Train Orchestra. He wanted to collaborate with them after hearing one of their shows and thought that was a sound that could fit some of the songs he was currently working on. This combination of musicians made for some interesting sounds and an energetic mood all over the record that I honestly didn’t really care for. Every track on the album felt very repetitive and very similar to the rest. Not a single track even stood out to me, good or otherwise, because of how unexciting it all was.
Another controversy to the release of the album was the use of A.I in the music video for the track “What Is The Reason For It”. This caused major backlash to his fans and really disappointed me as well as others. David Byrne has always been against big corporations and has always supported creativity, so this use of artificial intelligence in his own creative work seems like a stab in the back to fans and artists. The whole look and style of the video is “hand drawn” and with the fame of someone such as himself, he could have paid a real artist with real talent to make the video for him. He even could have done it himself, he actively has an art exhibit up at Pace Gallery in New York. It doesn’t really seem like his work, rather just a lazy project.
All in all, I’ve been a huge fan of David Byrne for most of my life, but the way he released such a lackluster album is pretty disappointing. I guess it’s hard for musicians to continue to make great music after they made some of the greatest music ever made, so I can’t be all too mad. But the way he made use of AI in his own artistic vision hits pretty hard. Again, I’m a huge fan of Byrne’s early work. The Talking Heads is one of my favorite bands ever, and I’m blown away every time I put on one of their records. But it seems as though I won’t be looking forward to future releases, if there is any.
