Formed in 2023 on, of all places, Salt Spring Island, Drama Queen reunites vocalist Knick Tomlinson and keyboardist Pierre Vincent Forgues—both previously of antic folkies Superfeather—with the hermetically tight rhythm section of Harley Dunn and former Sun Wizard and Shilohs drummer Ben Frey. But these four accomplished guitar-band refugees are in pursuit of something very different here. DramaQueen indulges a deep affection for the glorious, self-conscious pretensions of ‘70s art-school innovators like Bryan Ferry and the electronic pioneers who swallowed the subsequent half-century of pop.
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Crisp, precise, but teeming with tragic, theatrical amour, Death of a Romantic recalls Scary Monsters Bowie and all the New Romantic super creeps in his wake. Visage? Japan? Human League? The DNA is familiar from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop of the ‘60s to Berlin nightclubs in the ‘70s to Williamsburg house parties in the early 2000s. 

Here in 2026, it pulses out of the unlikeliest of dance colonies: the rainforests of the Gulf Islands on Canada’s West Coast. Album closer “Strange Years in the Distance” is like the conclusion to Drama Queen’s thesis statement, looking back to exotic British glam via Giorgio Moroder and Studio 54, but also forward to the strange years ahead, where post-modernism makes an ecstatic eternal loop out of everything.