INTRODUCING: Keith Carne

After 13 years behind the drum kit for indie-pop stalwarts We Are Scientists, New York-based musician Keith Carne is stepping forward with his luminous solo debut ‘Look For The Moon’, out now. The track arrives alongside the announcement of his first full-length solo album Magenta Light, due April 20, 2026, and offers a tender, skybound glimpse into a project that blends indie-pop songwriting with cosmic imagination and dancefloor pulse.

Built around shimmering synth textures and a groove influenced by the ’90s Madchester era, ‘Look For The Moon’ captures the emotional geography of touring life — where love stretches across time zones, airplane cabins and distant skies. Written for Carne’s wife, artist Hayley Youngs, the song draws on a simple ritual the pair share while apart: looking up at the same moon.

Across Magenta Light, Carne moves from the back of the bandstand to centre stage as songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Recorded largely in his Midtown Manhattan studio under the glow of an LED magenta lamp, the album merges spiritual jazz influences with indie-pop hooks and improvisational textures, drawing inspiration from artists as varied as Pharoah Sanders and Fred again..

Ahead of the release, Carne spoke about stepping into the spotlight, writing songs alone after years in bands, and how love, improvisation and cosmic imagery shaped the sound of Magenta Light.

After 13 years behind the kit with We Are Scientists, what gave you the confidence to step forward as a solo artist, and how did the creative process differ when you weren’t building songs collaboratively?

Haha. Well I’m still searching for the confidence part — I’ll let you know when I feel secure with it all. Like most humans, I respond really strongly to certain melodies and I guess I’ve just developed that muscle over the years of collaborative songwriting and arrangement I’ve done with the bands I work with. Whether it’s cinema, food, music… whatever, I have a lot of conviction in my taste. I don’t always think it’s correct but I’ve developed a strong sense of what I like and don’t like, and I just sort of go with my gut. I work on things until I’m sort of obsessed with them and they seem like good representations of my tastes. A lot of these ideas have been pent up inside of me. And I've been wanting to put something out that represents my aesthetic for a seriously long time now.

I used to play guitar and sing with my middle school and high school bands — sort of before I knew enough to know that I “should be” scared of doing it. But then people just started asking me to play drums for their projects and I really started to focus on becoming a better drummer and I fell away from "frontman-ing."

That said I’m not the best guitarist so going at it alone was very slow. If I heard ideas I wanted to put down I had to figure out how to play a lot of them. When I work with bands like We Are Scientists or Gem County, they’re full of excellent musicians and when you have an idea, you can just like sing it to them and then hear what it sounds like almost instantaneously.

The process is super different from working with a band. In ways that are inspiring but also ways that are dispiriting. Inspiring because if you’re really feeling like you’re in a flow state and loving all of the ideas you’re putting down you don’t have to slow down to solicit or accommodate any other opinions. I think I wrote the majority of “Totally Liminal” in one day because I just kept going and the ideas kept presenting themselves to me. But it’s dispiriting too because you have to dig yourself out of your own holes. If you get stuck or aren’t sure where to turn you have to not just get yourself out, but figure out a process to get yourself out. I’m an only child though so I like being alone and in that way I was used to playing and experimenting by myself.

“Look For The Moon” is such a tender, skyward love song — can you talk about how touring life and that ritual of sharing the same moon with Hayley shaped the lyrics and emotional tone of the track?

Thanks for saying that. That song means a lot to me. My wife and I are very close and when I’m touring in Europe or the West Coast — places with significant time differences — we have to rely on alternative ways to remain in touch because it’s not always easy to just pick up the phone and say “I love you. I miss you.” Looking up at the moon became one of those ways. Just looking FOR it started giving me comfort.

We also get to travel a lot and I just love that feeling of being on the way somewhere with the person you love — all the possibilities are still in front of you. And it feels so different to fly alone for work which I have to do a lot. That’s why there are so many references to flying — 37,000 feet, oblivion above the clouds, falling out of the sky, and — most importantly — Delta airlines in-flight wine (I wouldn’t say she’s a fan of it per se but my wife drinks it more regularly than I do). Because flying makes me think Of her. And ahead of a long tour, it can remind me of how she’s missing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNzt-zhcHE

You wrote, recorded, and produced almost everything on Magenta Light yourself. What surprised you most about taking full creative control, and did your background as a drummer influence how you approached melody and production?

The biggest surprise for sure was how quickly the drums came together. I can obsess over drum parts and sounds when I do them for other people’s recordings (I played on 60 songs last year for other artists). And I figured my songs would be even worse because the possibilities just seem endless. But it was amazing — I knew exactly what I wanted and when I had achieved it. The drums were by far the easiest and fastest things for me to record.

That also gave me an even more developed understanding of how to play drums on other people's songs. I've always tried to make the drums support a piece of music -- to not overcomplicate or overthink a drum part. But now, having supplied the drums for my own music I really understand that when a super simple idea works really well, just go with it. Pain and questioning don't have to be part of the process.

The drum part is actually what kick started “Look for the Moon” — I conceptualized a drum part — that sort of Madchester, meets 90s adult contemporary pop drum groove and sound. It just sort of popped into my head and that brought to mind the main chorus melody — especially the lyric “I think about you ev-ery night.” I could imagine all the imagery we know from 90s videos -- a silhouetted singer or sax player, a white silk shirt blowing in a wind machine -- just from those two groove and melodic ideas. The rest was just filling in the rest of the puzzle. So I matched that up with some chord changes I was messing around with and realized exactly whom I think about every night — my wife.

The album draws on spiritual jazz, dance-floor catharsis, and even psychedelic imagery — especially the vision of “magenta light” that inspired the title. How did those spiritual and cosmic ideas translate into actual sounds in the studio?

I keep thinking of the word "gushing" to describe my music. I feel extremely emotionally connected to the music I love -- the greatest compliment from me is the face emoji with tears streaming down the character's face. And for some reason the color magenta contains those same emotional cues. Glittering, indulgent, fantastical... It's both light and dark. This music is almost my synesthetic interpretation of the color.

I love to improvise and see what happens in the moment so I would often just allow my mind to wander — either on the keyboard or on the drums — and see what resulted. I would try to match what I was feeling with a melodic or textural idea and let things develop from there. Two of the songs on the album — “Mist Trail” and “Keep Away” are actually manipulated live recordings of me improvising with one of my best friends and closest musical collaborators Justin “Bestamo” Gaynor. We record a lot of free improvisation, then I like to go back and dig through the recordings, hunting for the sections that have serious groove, or conversely serious space and openness. Those parts often become the basis for songs.

Having spent years anchoring a band from behind the scenes, how are you navigating the shift in identity — both personally and publicly — from drummer to frontperson.

Haha -- I'll let you know more about that after playing a show or two! One of the things that's been really helpful is shooting a music video. One of my best friends, Al Markman, is a seriously talented filmmaker and we spent a weekend upstate shooting a video for my song "Totally Liminal." Over that weekend I grew more comfortable "stepping into a character" because the video centers on a character with an intense personality. One that's different from me, but I could imagine echoes of myself in their behavior. The person playing drums is me. The person who is singing at the front of the bandstand is a version of me.

It's also the first time I'm signing lyrics that personally mean a lot to me and maybe most crucially are in a key that really suits my voice. Those elements really help to make me feel comfortable.