Editor’s Note: Unlettered is the post-punk project led by multi-instrumentalist Mike Knowlton. On June 26th, the band will release a new album, entitled Devil’s Bowl. Vocals were written and performed by Knowlton alongside co-lyricist Kelly Grimm, which, according to the album’s press release, “shift between incantation and observation, rarely offering comfort, never offering easy resolution.” A couple of tracks also feature drummer Peter Gordon, Knowlton’s longtime bandmate in Gapeseed and Poem Rocket, which the press release says reconnects “the present tense of Unlettered with the physical momentum of its past.” Back in 2024, we talked about the band’s album at the time, Five Mile Point.
You can listen to their new single “Before::After” below:
Here’s a great description of the album, courtesy of a press release:
“Knowlton (Gapeseed, Poem Rocket), has always worked in tension: guitars detuned until they shimmer and scrape, basslines that pulse like a distant warning system, rhythms that blur the line between mechanical and human. On Devil’s Bowl, that pressure extends beyond the self. It doesn’t build, it spreads. This record turns its attention outward, toward a culture saturated in spectacle, toward systems that feel simultaneously fragile and immovable. Identity flickers between authenticity and performance. Assurance masquerades as knowledge. The public square swells with volume, but meaning slips through the cracks. The songs move like transmissions from a landscape where consensus has eroded, and the ground itself feels provisional. Musically, Devil’s Bowl tightens the screws. Guitars grind and recoil. Bass carries the melodic weight like a slow-moving storm front…This is not a protest record, though it vibrates with unrest. It is not a manifesto, though it circles questions of power, performance, and collapse. It is not a diagnosis — more like a fever reading.”
Below, Knowlton pens an essay about how the lack of a music scene helped him develop the identity of Unlettered:
There’s a Replacements lyric that goes “seen your video, that phony rock and roll.” I think about that line sometimes when I’m in my studio in Southwest Florida, working on music that has no obvious reason to exist here.
The area I live in is not a music town. Well, at least not my type of music town. Within eighty miles, there are only a few decent record stores and a couple of interesting bands if you know where to look. Mostly it’s parrotheads, cover bands, flip flops, retirees, tourists, and a heat that sits on you like a physical object from May through October. The wildlife is strange, and the plants look like they’re from another planet, but the strangeness has its own beauty.
I moved here from the New York area to be closer to my parents. Before that, I’d spent my formative years playing in bands in the NYC underground — Gapeseed, then Poem Rocket — surrounded by a scene that generated its own energy. You didn’t have to go looking for inspiration because inspiration was everywhere, in the rehearsal spaces, the venues, the other bands, the conversations after shows. The scene found you.
When you don’t have a scene, you have to find it yourself. And that requires a different approach. My scene now is online. Bandcamp is my record store, my way of knowing what’s happening. Online communities fill in the rest. It’s not a replacement, but it’s real. And in some ways, the distance is clarifying. You’re still making music in reaction to something, just not what’s physically around you.
But Florida gets in anyway. You can’t seal yourself off from a place entirely, especially one this strange and beautiful. The heat, the humidity, the sensation that nature here operates on its own terms. It’s in the recordings whether I plan for it or not. There’s a claustrophobia that sets into the studio during the long summers that I’ve stopped fighting. The cover of Devil’s Bowl is a hurricane. That’s not an accident.
I named this music project Unlettered because I wanted to make something without waiting for permission. No scene to validate it, no label to release it, no local community to play it for. Just a studio in SW Florida, Logic Pro, a variety of guitars, amps, mics, and the conviction that the music was worth making. That conviction has to come from inside, not from what’s around you.
I’m still figuring out where exactly. What I do know is that making music that has no obvious reason to exist here might be exactly the reason to make it.
You can connect with Mike Knowlton and Unlettered in the links in his author box below
Mike Knowlton
Contributor
Mike Knowlton makes things for a living and for fun. He is a Partner at Campfire where he builds participatory programs and immersive experiences. He also makes music with Unlettered, a post-punk project with a new album out June 2026, and Poem Rocket, an experimental art rock band on Silver Girl Records.
