The long awaited album from Key4050, the duo of tech-trance icons Bryan Kearney and John O’Callaghan, finally dropped and to say it was worth the wait would be an understatement.
Tales From The Temple, released on Black Hole Recordings, is the first album from the Irish duo and features a variety of sounds that span the trance and techno genres.
The massive 32-track album was released a whopping 3 years after they first announced the Key4050 moniker with Gianfranco. Keeping fans on their toes, a year and a half later Key4050 made their live debut at Dreamstate SoCal in 2017. Their high-energy set was filled with both hard techy sounds and melodic uplifting tracks. This was a huge tease for fans, as most of these tracks remained IDs until the day the album dropped. Kearney and O’Callaghan kept most aspects of their project very tight-lipped; there were no singles released and only a handful of festival sets played by Key4050 in 2018.
Also premiering with the album is a 25-minute mini documentary which features the guys visiting various spots in Ireland that had an impact on their music. The most significant one is the Temple Theatre, a former nightclub in Ireland which Kearney calls “ the most influential building in my life.” JOC says it was “the start of an 18 year journey towards this Key4050 album.” It only seems fitting that their album gets its name from such a place. The club, which closed its doors in 2003, had an upstairs area called The Space and a downstairs named The Crypt, which the two album discs are named after.
The documentary also answers one burning question fans have had all along: Where does the name Key4050 come from? Drumroll…. It’s the code to get into JOC’s apartment where they made their first ever tracks together.
Listen to Key4050´s Tales From The Temple:
The first disc, The Space, starts off with perhaps the duo’s most recognizable song – Beetlejuice. It does a great job of getting the listener excited for what’s to come. It’s fast-paced and techy with robotic vocals we’ll hear in several other tracks, including the next one, Wendle. Utterly Butterly is uplifting, beautiful and a nice change of pace as the 4th song in. Anyone familiar with Kearney or JOC’s solo sets will recognize Dinklebot. Quadruplets gives us a taste of psytrance, peppered with the words “Key4050” over a very infectious beat that’s hard to sit still to. Closing out disc 1 is the emotional Otterfly. It’s the type of song that gives you many feels as the set or festival ends.
Luckily, we still have another disc.
Disc 2 aka The Crypt starts off hard with Irwin, a song that makes you feel as if you’re embarking on a journey to somewhere dark and unknown. Appropriately titled, Take a Break sits right in the middle of the 16-tracks and allows us to do as its name suggests. It starts off slow and dreamy with a 2 minute build to a sound we’re more used to from these two. Finkle und Einhorn tips its hat to Ace Ventura (the movie, not the psytrance artist). The penultimate track, Dickie Tummay sounds like something out of a horror movie (in the best way). This dark techy album ends on a lighter note with the ethereal track Alka slowing it way down. These two certainly know how to take their listeners on a journey.
Key4050 makes their Tomorrowland debut in July and have teased a show in Los Angeles this year on Instagram.
