Superfan – Picture of Return
Superfan is the project of Kali Priya Flanagan, a Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist and producer who started studying music at four, signed his first record deal at fourteen, and racked up millions of streams during the pandemic under the name KALI before walking away from the indie-pop machinery that produced them. “Picture of Return” marks his signing to AD 93, the London label home of Joanne Robertson, Dagmar Zuniga and YHWH Nailgun, and it’s a strong fit: the label’s taste for music that sits between song and texture suits what Superfan does.
Flanagan plays nearly everything on the track himself: drums, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, synths and vocals, with cello from Omeed Almassi and additional feedback from Hudson Pollock. Almassi’s strings have become central to the project, and the arrangement here carries a lot of the song’s weight. Flanagan describes the song as being about emotional manipulation, about falling into a trap built from someone else’s projections, and the lyrics work that idea through unusually physical imagery: a room standing in as the only witness, surroundings that deflate, appearance pushed underneath the skin. The recurring image of a face as a “picture of return” is the sharpest one, longing and dread folded into the same object. What got me is the line of thinking about agency, or its absence: the song’s narrator can’t act, only wish and wait for it to pass, and the music holds that suspended feeling rather than resolving it.
Alongside the visualizer there’s a live version filmed by Garrett Winston inside the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the signing comes with a debut UK/Europe headline tour announcement, with London and Paris dates among them. Between this, his work in the Midwest emo band Holidays in the United States, and a live CV that includes opening for The Strokes at Red Rocks at Julian Casablancas’ invitation, Flanagan is clearly someone worth tracking. On this evidence, AD 93 got there at the right moment.
