Singer-songwriter, actor, filmmaker, and dancer Bobby Paraknight’s new single “NEO” comes like a myth wrapped in static. It’s mysterious, bold, and bathed in spiritual urgency. The production is purposefully chaotic: swirling with distorted electronics, haunting vocal stacks, and a reverbed voice that seems to fall through time itself.
“NEO” is definitely unique for its avant-garde musicality, but it hides some really good and surprisingly bold lyricism under the noise. This song comes like a political metaphor as Bobby casts himself as a modern-day Moses and a Messiah, taking on both God and man in a spiritual-political allegory where the lines between lover, people, and divine blur, and so do the vocals.
Lines like “Bobby, you could’ve been our Messiah” and “You can’t narrate in a holy book” draw from a deeply personal yet culturally charged well. He sings in English, Urdu, and Spanish, mixing tongues and mirroring the global, fractured world he’s critiquing. This is less pop theology, more a lamentation wrapped in a revolution. The singer is almost depicting the geopolitical chaos the world is turning into now, all because of a messianic belief.
The track’s soundscape follows suit as waves of warped synths churn slowly like oil over fire. Bobby’s vocals are sometimes clear, sometimes buried under murky layers, a nod to both the confusion of modern existence and the filtered truths we’re fed. The beatboxing near the end feels almost like an invocation, a final breath before silence.
Born in Lahore, raised in New York, and trained in everything from Broadway to ballet, Bobby’s art fuses the epic grandeur of The Prince of Egypt with the mechanical intensity of Metropolis. Listen to his latest, “NEO” on Spotify.
Bonus (man behind the artist):
It was collected by a certain unnamed someone from bobby’s inner circle regarding his persona that perhaps “Bobby has an aristocratic calm and intellectual charm to himself but most evidently a cunning challenge.” these qualities, as we’ve noted, regularly on display around the trendiest clubs in New York city. Bobby however is known to have become a complete anti-alcohol and opens tabs for friends or girlfriends only which he’s well documented to have a slew of at all times following him wherever he goes, his typical type? “Shalom Harlow!” said this person with unhinged confidence as if a well gossiped factoid. But that’s a whole another story.
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Review by: Naomi Joan