Crooked Royals Signs With U.S. Label 3DOT Recordings (EXCLUSIVE)

Crooked Royals have a new throne.

The NZ guitar band signs with 3DOT Recordings, the renowned U.S. heavy label founded and curated by monsters of rock Periphery.

Based in Auckland, the quintet is led by Christian Carstensen (clean vocals), Lee Mackley (heavy vocals), Jake Andrews (guitar), Keane Gilles (drums), and Conor Lawson (bass).

With their new deal, Crooked Royals immediately gets to work with a new single “Glass Hands,” which drops today (Aug. 4) ahead of their full-length album Quarter Life Daydream, cut during the pandemic.

Recorded and mixed by Zorran Mendonsa (Coridian) and mastered by George Lever (Sleep Token, Loathe, Thornhill), Quarter Life Daydream is due out Oct. 21 via 3DOT Recordings.

“Glass Hands” is “about a person who wants to believe in something so hard that they’ll do anything for it,” Carstensen explains. “We want listeners to be critical of this voice though.”

“It’s similar to when people get news from a headline on social media,” adds Mackley. “They’ll spout the headline, but they don’t read the actual article. They just believe in it without understanding it”.

Crooked Royals has been making a lot of noise in the heavy music space since their 2018 EP Interwine.

Support slots followed with the likes of Northlane, Polaris, Monuments, and more, and a followup EP Rumination dropped in 2019.

Launched in 2018, 3DOT is “a passion project first and foremost,” says Misha Mansoor of Periphery, “and as a result we can focus on genuinely supporting the bands we work with, thereby using our love of music as our driving force.”

Those bands include Bulb, Astronoid, Destrage, and Haunted Shores.