By the time Provoker released their 2023 sophomore outing Demon Compass, they were already talking about their next album. The LA synth-pop trio were on a roll, and the songs kept coming. Holed up in an Echo Park attic, frontman Christian Crow Petty began to think of hauntings — him as a specter in his friends’ house, or the apparitions and memories that follow us around. Provoker’s next feat of world-building was underway, with Petty conjuring a landscape full of dead selves, the things we have left behind or dearly wish we could leave behind, all housed in a third album aptly titled Mausoleum.
“It did make me feel like I was a ghost,” Petty laughs about his stint in the attic. “You’re the one making the creaks in the ceiling.” But as much as Mausoleum’s thematic content was defined by isolation, the music was the most communal of Provoker’s career. Petty deepened his songwriting partnership with Jonathon Lopez, the synth wizard who originally founded Provoker ten years ago as a solo vehicle to write imagined film scores. While some material was still completed individually, much of Mausoleum came together with Petty, Lopez, and bassist Wil Palacios workshopping ideas in various studio sessions, responding to each other in real time.
Having promised new creative approaches for their third album, Provoker also opened themselves up to more collaboration. “Before, we were pretty reclusive,” Petty explains. Mausoleum found the trio working with a host of music scene friends, with production from Elliot Kozell, Simon Christensen, Mikey Heart, and Zach Fogerty — all of it overseen by none other than esteemed producer Kenny Beats.
The burst of collaboration and inspiration meant Provoker had around twenty songs for Mausoleum. When they first met up with Kenny Beats, it was intended as a social hang, but after playing him a track he asked if he could rework it. This blossomed into an executive producer role where he took the nearly completed Mausoleum and put everything through a new filter, amping up the bass and drums across the album. “He made it sound like us, but way bigger,” Lopez recalls.
With Beats’ guiding hand, Provoker achieved a new sense of grandeur. Their trademark aesthetic — synth shadows, crystalline beats, and smoky vocals equal parts R&B croon and post-punk growl, all influenced by otherworldly horror movies and video games — remains intact, but boasts a different scope and muscularity. Three albums in, Mausoleum finds Provoker at a moment of both synthesis and evolution, their unique sound having grown bolder and sharpened.
Where in the past Petty filled Provoker’s music with supernatural creatures and sci-fi scenarios, he explores a subtler vein on Mausoleum — exorcising personal demons rather than fictitious ones, imagining the album taking place in a disgusting, squalid metropolis populated by ghosts sometimes literal but more often spiritual. It’s a distorted version of our own reality. “I like to make mini-movies, where if you listen to the song it places you in this world,” Petty explains. “This one is more of this world, but still haunting.”
