Kirin J Callinan is 2013’s most kinetic, confounding, and exciting “new” artist. For real! This is an opinion easier to come upon, and maintain, if you’ve had the good fortune of seeing him live intermittently over the past six months, as I have. (At Glasslands for CMJ, where he ruled, and a few weeks ago in a startlingly intimate 40-person theater near Union Square, where he ruled again, this time as a campy mix of Scott Walker and Patrick Bateman.) If you can’t see him live, you could start with the “Embracism” video, and then get that tortured track’s spiritual counterpoint in “Love Delay,” which is the new one Kirin’s released as of today. It starts with the sort of staccato guitar chord inversions that could launch a classic rock song, though that’s dashed when Callinan’s raspy music theater voice comes in, and the track’s heartbeat becomes palpable, calibrated to this pulse: “You. Know. Me. FIRE.” Where his other stuff has had a Suicide-like dour industrialism, here the serrated sounds and the overall tone is genuinely uplifting, love’s “Delay” be damned. Listen to him, he’s good. Go see him live, he’ll weird out your friend and appeal to you. Kirin J Callinan, 2013’s new iconoclast.

Embracism is out 7/2 via Terrible. Pre-order it. Kirin reprints his lyrics in the about fields of his videos, so it feels right to reprint them:

You
And I
I’ll keep You
In my mind
Standing there in your underwear
With your long black hair
Please wait
I’ve been a fool
But when the train stops calling
And the clouds sit o the floor
When hands thank You
And views look back
You.
When tomorrow can’t wait for You
Please wait
When silence bows for You
And the dogs feed the boy
You know me fire
You know me fire
You.

Wait, please wait

When the train stops calling
And the clouds sit on the floor
When hands thank you
And views look back
When the word stops talking
When truth lies broken
Will we still know?
May we still love?
We will die alone