Melania Kol - Okay that's a great idea because if I do that then
- Samuel Stevens
- 32 minutes ago
- 5 min read
For an artist whose entire creative philosophy seems built around refusing to stand still, Melaina Kol’s Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then feels paradoxically like a moment of arrival.
The Nashville-based project of Logan Hornyak has undergone several transformations since its 2018 debut Bird Kill Worm, moving from lo-fi twee-pop through the folktronica of 2021’s AMOSAT and continually reshaping its sound with each subsequent release. Hornyak has never seemed particularly interested in establishing a signature sound so much as dismantling whatever one might have formed around him at the time of writing the next project. With his latest release, Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then, set for release on August 14, 2026, via Julia's War Recordings, however, that restless experimentation produces something unexpectedly grounded.
Much of that comes from what Hornyak deliberately leaves behind. Guitar and electronics, previously central to his work, are largely pushed into the background as he instead teaches himself cello and harp and returns to the piano training of his childhood. The result is an album that approaches music with the logic of electronic production while almost entirely using organic materials. Cello, piano, harp, flute, percussion and voice are chopped, looped, repeated and layered until they become something simultaneously recognizable and alien.
“Bleater” opens up the album and establishes that tension immediately. Bowed and pizzicato cello create an ominous, almost spectral environment, but there is an unusual intimacy to the recording. Rather than burying the instruments beneath layers of studio processing, Hornyak lets their physical presence remain audible. Every pluck, scrape and resonance seems deliberately placed. The music can feel unsettling, but it is never cold.
That sense of tactile experimentation carries into “Parallel,” arguably the album’s boldest collision of influences. Hornyak describes it as his attempt to make house music using entirely organic instruments, and the concept works precisely because he doesn’t try to disguise the source material. An insistent pulse, busy vocal samples and contributions from Husam Suboh and Luna Kupper give the track an unusual kinetic energy. Its lyrics may be intentionally nonsensical, but the production communicates plenty. Inspired in part by Gwen Stefani’s Love. Angel. Music. Baby., Hornyak turns pop excess into something stranger and more mischievous.
If “Parallel” is the album at its most playful, “Idola” is one of its most emotionally revealing. Piano, cello, and acoustic guitar create a delicate, almost chamber-pop atmosphere around lyrics concerned with growing old alongside someone and the fear of continually failing to live up to an idealized conception of love. It is a quietly devastating idea, particularly because the arrangement refuses to overstate it. Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then is full of moments like this: emotions are allowed to emerge from the texture rather than being announced.
Hornyak’s approach to vocals is perhaps the record’s most fascinating experiment. He became increasingly obsessed with the idea of not singing traditionally, imagining melodies that didn't necessarily suit his voice. Olivia O of Lowertown provides the sweet, wistful vocal performance on the title track, which Hornyak subsequently chops and repurposes as a source of vocal textures elsewhere. On other songs, he sings gibberish and allows words to emerge from sounds and syllables.
It gives the album’s voice an almost dreamlike quality. Language is present, but rarely behaves conventionally. Meaning arrives sideways.
“Lifeheart” exemplifies this approach, combining manipulated vocal fragments with harp and intricate instrumental layers. Hornyak’s fascination with two contrasting guitar parts also surfaces here, with each part functioning independently while contributing to a larger unified sound. It’s representative of an album where individual components can feel disconnected until suddenly they click together.
The harp brings a different kind of transformation. On “Okay that’s a great idea” and “Lifeheart,” its lightness and spaciousness provide some of the album’s most beautiful passages. Against the record’s stranger rhythmic constructions, the instrument can feel almost weightless. It’s a particularly effective expression of the album’s central contradiction: music created through painstaking experimentation that nevertheless feels increasingly peaceful.
“Vai” pushes that idea toward cinematic territory. Hornyak conceived it as an attempt at a movie score inspired by Yann Tiersen, and the plucked cello loops gradually recede and swell into something poignant and expansive. “Minuet” similarly plays with the expectations of classical form, while “Eng” continues the album’s fascination with instrumental interplay and repetition.
The closing “ili” is perhaps the clearest distillation of the record’s ambient side. Built from flute samples, it feels less like a conventional song than an environment slowly dissolving around the listener. After the restless experimentation that precedes it, the track lands with a strange sense of calm.
That calm is essential to understanding Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then. Hornyak has spoken openly about the circumstances surrounding his earlier records, describing them as products of his early twenties, when he was experiencing manic episodes and struggling with drug use. This album feels like it comes from the other side of that turbulence. It isn't devoid of darkness—far from it—but the darkness is no longer the destination.
The influence of Cormac McCarthy’s bestseller The Road and the 1986 animated movie When the Wind Blows makes that especially apparent. Both works confront devastating circumstances while maintaining some belief in the possibility of hope, and Hornyak's music similarly refuses to resolve despair through simple optimism. Instead, hope appears as something fragile, almost accidental: a melody emerging from noise, a harp entering an otherwise unsettled arrangement, a vocal fragment finding meaning after beginning as gibberish.
There is also a noticeable humility in the way Hornyak made the record. Teaching himself instruments means that technical imperfection becomes part of the creative process. Rather than hiding those limitations, he follows them. Recording for the first time in a professional studio, he sought a high-fidelity sound without excessive effects, even resisting reverb in favour of making the listener feel as though they are physically in the room with the performers. His attention to the “micro-details” of individual performances gives the album an unusually immediate quality.
That immediacy is what ultimately separates Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then from merely being another exercise in genre experimentation. There are plenty of musicians capable of combining classical instrumentation, ambient music, and electronic rhythms. Hornyak is interested in something more personal: what happens when unfamiliar sounds become a way of understanding a familiar emotional landscape.
The album’s title itself feels like a miniature manifesto. It captures the impulsive curiosity that has always driven Melaina Kol, but here that impulse is tempered by experience. Hornyak is still following strange ideas wherever they lead; he just sounds less compelled to outrun himself.
Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then is therefore both an experiment and a reckoning. It is an album about learning—new instruments, new recording techniques, new ways of using the voice—and, more subtly, about learning how to inhabit a calmer version of yourself. Its songs can be disorienting, peculiar, and occasionally difficult to pin down, but their emotional center is remarkably clear.
For an artist defined by constant reinvention, Melaina Kol’s newest evolution may be its most compelling and distinct yet: music that sounds like someone discovering that peace can be just as interesting as chaos.
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