I Released an Album. That Was Definitely Not on My 2026 Bingo Card.

There are sentences you expect to say at some point in your life.

“I launched another website” would not surprise anybody who knows me. “I am working on a new marketing project” is basically background noise at this point. Even “I started another brand” probably would not get much of a reaction.

“I released an album” is different.

That one was definitely not on my 2026 bingo card.

And yet, here we are. Beets n Bangers is now a real music project with music out in the world, and the first release represents the Beets side of the idea.

I am still getting used to that sentence.

Beets n Bangers started because I wanted to make something different

A lot of the projects I have been building lately have some connection to things I have done for years: websites, content, photography, video, marketing, travel or media.

Music is adjacent to that world, but it is not the same thing.

I have always loved music. I have spent plenty of time around creative production and I have worked on visual ideas for music before, but building an actual music project forced me to think differently about identity, mood, sequencing and the relationship between what something sounds like and what it looks like.

That is one reason Beets n Bangers became more interesting to me than simply making a few tracks and moving on.

It needed a world around it.

The artwork, the visual language and the two sides of the project all became part of the same idea. Once that started taking shape, it felt worth finishing properly instead of treating it like another experiment that would live forever in a folder on my computer.

Beets and Bangers are two different artists inside the same project

I do not want to give away the entire backstory yet because part of the fun is letting the project reveal itself over time.

The important thing to understand right now is that Beets n Bangers is built around two artists: Beets and Bangers.

The release that is out now is the Beets side.

That distinction matters because the project is not finished with this version of the songs. There is another half coming.

Bangers will have a take on the same collection of songs.

Same underlying collection. Different artist. Different perspective.

That structure is one of the things I liked most about the concept from the beginning. It gives me a way to explore how the same material can live in two related but distinct identities without needing to explain every detail before people have even had a chance to hear the first side.

For now, I would rather let Beets be Beets.

Releasing something changes how you look at it

There is a huge difference between a creative project sitting on your computer and one that other people can actually hear.

While something is private, you can keep tweaking it forever. Change a detail. Revisit a visual. Question a decision you made two weeks ago. Decide that the thing is “almost ready” for another month.

Eventually, you have to stop working on the possibility of the project and release the actual project.

That moment is uncomfortable in a useful way.

I have felt versions of it with websites, photography and video for years. Music makes it feel new again because I do not have the same history of releasing albums that I have of launching sites or publishing content.

There is something healthy about being a beginner at part of the process again.

The visual side mattered almost as much as the music

One thing that probably will not surprise anybody is how much attention I gave the look of Beets n Bangers.

I come from a visual background. Photography, video, design and websites have trained me to think about how something feels before a person reads a single word about it.

With a music project, that becomes even more obvious. The album art, artist identities, site, social graphics and overall visual mood are not separate decoration added after the music is finished. They shape the first impression of the project.

That is why I did not want generic cover art or a generic artist page. Beets n Bangers needed to look like it belonged to the same world as the music.

The result is louder, stranger and more stylized than most of the things I build professionally, which is exactly the point.

This is also why I keep building things I own

A project like this probably makes the most sense in the context of everything else I have been doing this year.

I wrote recently about why I am creating media properties I own. Beets n Bangers is another version of that impulse, just in a completely different medium.

There is no client brief telling me the music project has to exist. There is no campaign requirement forcing me to make it. It exists because the idea interested me enough to keep going.

That kind of project is useful even before you know what the long-term result will be. It stretches different creative muscles. It makes you solve unfamiliar problems. It reminds you how much work is hidden behind things that look simple after they are finished.

And sometimes it gives you a sentence you never expected to say.

“I released an album.”

The Bangers side is still coming

The Beets release is not the end of the idea. It is the first half of the structure I had in mind.

The Bangers side is coming next, with Bangers’ interpretation of the same collection of songs. I am deliberately not overexplaining how the two halves connect yet. I want there to be something left to discover when the second side arrives.

For now, the Beets side is out there.

If you search for Beets n Bangers on the streaming service you use, give it a listen. I genuinely want to know what people think, especially because this project sits outside the things most people know me for.

Maybe the strangest part of 2026 is not that I released music.

It is that after all the websites, marketing work, photography, videos and other projects I have built, making an album somehow feels like a perfectly logical addition to the list.

I am not sure what that says about me.

But I am already working on the other half.