Album art by Arief Rachmad

Style: Progressive rock, alternative rock, dark cabaret (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: The Dear Hunter, Diablo Swing Orchestra, Muse, My Chemical Romance
Country: United States (Arizona)
Release date: 4 September 2026

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“Theater kid” isn’t exactly a phrase that has the most positive connotations among most people. To be a theater kid is to be seen as a painfully extra attention hog, an uncomfortably earnest showoff unable to socialize with “normal” folks without making an out-of-nowhere Broadway reference or harmonizing along with whatever music is playing in the background. Thus, by extension, “theater kid” has become an epithet to describe any form of art that is over the top both in its heart-on-sleeve emotionality and its luxurious, ornate production values that eschews any trace of subtlety or fear of being “cringe” in order to fully embrace its true, weird self. Such values, of course, fit the world of prog like a sequined glove, from the intricate multi-album musical narratives of The Dear Hunter to the nigh-operatic bombast of Devin Townsend, all the way back to those early Genesis days where Peter Gabriel pranced around dressed like a flower. But, what if a band decided to go even further beyond, to craft music so unapologetically, infectiously dorky that even my fellow prog fans here at the Subway would look at it and go, “This is some serious theater kid shit“? 

Wonder no longer, my dear audience, for Arizona’s own Bear Ghost is here to answer that question with aplomb. The band’s self-styled “adventure rock” sound is a bubbling, spirited, vibrant cauldron of influences, blending elements from the aforementioned TDH, Muse, and My Chemical Romance at their most Black Parade-era theatrical. From there, they spice things up with the gleefully anarchic genre-bending of Diablo Swing Orchestra and the nervy, motormouthed lyricism of Will Wood, all crafted inside an abandoned arcade cabinet at the edge of Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s a wild ride of a sound, one that veers erratically between a dozen sonic and tonal extremes at once, and it’s one the band have been honing for over a decade now, most recently on the wonderfully lush Jiminy in 2023.¹ After the numerous delays that album faced, its follow-up Tiny Hitman has arrived less than three years later, a downright brisk turnaround by comparison. A “partial concept album” revolving around the dilemmas of our current age, most prominently the ever-present specter of AI, Tiny Hitman is poised to bring the band’s off-kilter whimsy into conversation with more serious subject matter than ever before. It’s a long shot—will they nail their target?

One thing is for sure: even with songs that touch upon such topics as class warfare, fascism, and the trillion-dollar prediction machines slowly eating away at our collective psyche, Bear Ghost‘s sense of silly spookiness stays strong. The music here is explosive, maximalist, and frequently fixated on having as much fun as possible, with Latin trumpets and percussion colliding with gleeful children’s choirs as smatterings of chiptuney synths and clattering xylophones crash in on rambunctious riffs—it’s a lot, to put it mildly. Tiny Hitman is a bonkers funhouse packed fuller than ever with the stylistic swerves that have long been part and parcel of the Bear Ghost experience; whether it all comes off as a bit “too much” will depend on the individual listener’s tolerance for theatricality. 

Said theatricality, though, is sold shockingly well, with every seemingly silly gimmick being built on some rock-solid songcraft. The sheer energy radiating off of Tiny Hitman could power an industrial turbine, with ripping riffs and ultra-catchy hooks aplenty that make the likes of “Rats! Rats! Rats!”² and “I Got You, It Was Easy” impossible for me to listen to without bouncing in my seat like an overcaffeinated eight-year-old. Put simply, this shit fucking rips, and that’s enough to forgive a few of the album’s weirder indulgences. A polka interlude? Sure, sounds fun! A random rap verse? Fuck yeah, Hamilton was great actually! I will concede that a couple ventures feel a tad too twee—the doofy, ukulele-led “Hearty of Five” probably could’ve been cut—but beyond that, Bear Ghost make everything somehow work via pure, unadulterated moxie. There’s also the excellent vocals of bandleader Ryan Abel, who has quietly become one of prog’s most versatile singers over the past few years, capable of pulling off dramatic belting, smooth croons, and scenery-chewing goofiness in equal measure. He’s especially effective when mixing and matching these many modes, elevating the otherwise simple haunted-house tale of “Scarebnb” with a blend of hyperactive patter, stratospheric high notes, and soft pathos that underscores the tragic isolation of its undead narrator in an effective bit of emotional whiplash.

And, indeed, Tiny Hitman is a masterclass in mood swings, wielding its tonal dissonances to mine surprising thematic depth from its seemingly silly sound. Of course, there are the likes of “Monster Guts”, which wraps its angry political message in layers of Halloweeny allegory and sound dressing³, or “New Kids” having its anti-billionaire invective turned into a playground chant, but the cleanest such case comes from “The Proposal” and its companion piece, “I Got You, It Was Easy”. It’s a textbook case of setup and payoff, starting with an uncanny, sweet-yet-sickening love ballad to an AI “partner” that is abruptly cut off by a vicious, taunting villain song gloating about how that “love” was a hollow charade in the name of capital. Fitting, I suppose, for theater kids to have a handle on dramatic irony.

Yet, in an album so full of goofy gimmickry, the greatest swerve of all is to throw those gimmicks out, and in doing so, the two-part finale is possibly the most transcendent music Bear Ghost have ever made. “Sunshine” is a deliriously uneasy waltz, a four-minute buildup that explodes into a goosebump-inducing wail of a climax, yet the ending gives no room to breathe as it segues into the epic finale of the title track. I cannot stress enough how much of an utter banger “Tiny Hitman” is, a rip-roaring journey through a dozen dynamic peaks and valleys laden with keening, Muse-esque falsettos and towering layers of twisted, cyber-gothic synths that I need hooked into my veins immediately. It’s a fantastic maturation of their sound, and if future albums end up expanding in this direction, we may soon have a modern classic on our hands.

Thematically, too, these two tracks tie Tiny Hitman‘s threads together. Both share an apocalyptic bent, true, yet both also feel rooted in themes of parenthood and fatalism—”Sunshine” is from the point of view of a dying parent helpless to save their child from a nuclear holocaust, while “Tiny Hitman” personifies early AI as a childlike blank slate, inevitably shaped into a malignant, destructive force by the cruel, greedy nature of the human “parents” that trained it. This theme serves not just as a bookend to the hubristic parental figure of opener “In Our Image” extolling the glories of their “child”, but also as an undercurrent to the entire album. Suddenly the prominence of the kids’ choir makes a lot more sense, as moments like the childish “you can’t catch me” chant in “I Got You, It Was Easy” gain new context by painting the rogue AI as a specifically juvenile entity.⁴ Kids are malleable creatures, forged not just by their parents but by the callous systems of violence, inequality, and isolation that surround them. In that way, they’re not so different from an LLM taking in training data—garbage in, garbage out, as they say. Without proper guardrails, children and AI alike can easily absorb the absolute worst of humanity, evolving into a “tiny hitman” that thoughtlessly perpetuates the cycle of misery. Pretty sure the average kid drinks a lot less water, though.

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Recommended tracks: “In Our Image”, “New Kids”, “Sunshine”, “Tiny Hitman”
You may also like: Moron Police, Native Construct, Toehider
Final verdict: 8.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Bear Ghost is:
– Ryan Abel (lead vocals, guitars, keyboards, programming)
– Andrew Heath (bass, backing vocals, co-lead vocals on “Rats! Rats! Rats!”)
– Myke “Buttonz” Roa (drums, percussion, spoken word on “The Proposal”)
With guests:
– Katelyn Lindeman, Ollie Abel, Karla Heath, Tigbot, and JG (additional vocals)
– Nick Davies (piano on “Tiny Hitman”)

1. Fun fact: Jiminy came out right when I was a brand-new reviewer here at the Subway, and I only discovered the existence of our “no more than 20k monthly listeners” rule (which nobody had yet informed me of directly for some reason) when I tried to review it and got promptly shot down. Now, nearly three years later, that rule is gone, and I’m finally able to cover their new stuff! Something, something, full circle. ↩︎
2. A track which reprises the riff from “12 Years Howled” off the band’s debut, a song about an adolescent werewolf that I’ve seen theorized as a metaphor for the changes of puberty. It’s interesting to think of these “rats” as similarly metaphorical, a representation of our capacity for taking gluttonous pleasure in wanton destruction. Or maybe it’s just a silly song about the Black Plague, I dunno. ↩︎
3. I mean, the lines about a “king of lies” shouting falsehoods about monsters “eating pets” in order to justify hunting them down aren’t exactly subtle given current events, but they’re not obvious on first listen either. ↩︎
4. Among said children’s choir is Ryan Abel’s young son Ollie, which might explain the sudden fixation on themes of parenthood and shaping the next generation. ↩︎