Jasio - 'Fantasy'

Canadian metal veteran Jasio Kulakowski launches his first solo chapter with an album that refuses to tiptoe into existence. Instead, 'Fantasy' erupts fully formed, drenched in colour, danger, and emotion, announcing a creator unafraid to tear down the walls he once helped build.

What immediately stands out is how boldly 'Fantasy' abandons any expectation that a veteran of metal should remain tethered to riffs and rage. Jasio chooses a different frontier. He trades the roar of amplifiers for something moodier, stranger, and more intimate: offering a fusion of brooding electronics, shadow-lit beats, and melodies that move like electricity humming through a midnight skyline. It’s as though he cracked open the circuitry of alt-pop, rock, and electronic music and stitched together his own shimmering, volatile hybrid.

You hear that bravery instantly in 'Fall', a track that surges with pulse-quickening momentum. Instead of relying on brute force, Jasio shapes tension through dynamic shifts, and hooks that hit with cinematic precision. It’s the sound of an artist who knows how to command a room, now choosing instead to command an atmosphere.

'Cloudline' might be the album’s purest piece of magic. It drifts, glimmers, and ascends, carried by airy synth arcs and an undercurrent of hypnotic rhythm. Jasio’s guitar becomes a ghost, a distant figure that appears only when absolutely necessary. When it cuts through, it’s a lightning flash; brief, brilliant, impossible to miss.

But what ties the entire record together is how intensely unified the vision feels. Every sound is placed with purpose, every transition sharpened, and every texture considered. It’s immersive in the way great world-building albums are, as we step inside and the edges of reality blur.

'Fantasy' is a full-scale metamorphosis, one where an artist with decades of musical battle scars discovers a new voice and a new frontier. It’s daring. It’s imaginative. And it cements Jasio as one of alternative music’s most intriguing shapeshifters.