Lawrence Tome revisits his 2025 debut King of the River with a renewed sense of presence, unveiling a new video for ‘Swamp Thing’ alongside the announcement of a long-awaited vinyl edition, arriving May 15th 2026. What began as a quietly circulated release has, over the past year, gathered steady momentum online, finding an audience attuned to its blend of atmospheric folk-pop and story-led songwriting, the kind of record that doesn’t demand attention so much as slowly earns it.
At the heart of ‘Swamp Thing’ is Tome’s gift for reframing mythology through an intimate emotional lens. Drawing on Alan Moore’s character, the song becomes less an adaptation than a reflection on transformation itself, identity in flux, and the uneasy aftermath of change that cannot be reversed. There’s a restraint to his writing that feels deliberate rather than minimal, allowing the narrative to breathe without ever losing its emotional tether.
That same discipline runs through the making of King of the River, recorded under tightly controlled, almost documentary-like conditions with producer Andrew Christopoulos in a remote Wisconsin cabin. With musicians separated by space but connected through headphones, and only a handful of takes captured per song, the album carries the imprint of immediacy, performances preserved before they had time to harden into something more polished or removed. The result is a body of work that feels both lived-in and fleeting, particularly in the latter half of the record where those sessions were captured in just a few hours.
Musically, ‘Swamp Thing’ sits comfortably within this wider world: warm acoustic textures, subtly shifting rhythmic detail, and a vocal delivery that floats rather than asserts itself. It’s a performance built on understatement, where melancholy and lightness coexist without resolution. The accompanying video extends that mood visually, echoing the song’s themes of transformation and emotional distance while reinforcing the record’s broader sense of atmosphere. As the vinyl edition brings King of the River into a more tactile format, the release feels less like a reissue and more like a continuation of the album’s slow unfolding life.
The ‘Swamp Thing’ video and King of the River vinyl release is out now, and are available here: Oakley Avenue Records – King of the River LP
