Spirit Award

Spirit Award is the project of Seattle based musician Daniel Lyon, who keeps his music on the rough side, at the edges where psychedelic grooviness meets the classic alt-rock crunch. He clearly has an affinity towards scuzzy tones and motorik type beats, a combination that gives his music a sense of dynamism and anchors it in a fairly familiar terrain. The music is uniformly dark, tonally for sure, but also in terms of the type of subject matters Lyon takes on in his songs that do not necessarily lend themselves well to an upbeat mood. That feeling is particularly amped up to a sense of foreboding on his 2023 album, aptly titled The Fear, which is high on angst, anger, and reverb.