Inside Area 51’s Most Mysterious Band: The Uprights Redefine Art in 2025

Some bands fit neatly into genres. The Uprights are not one of those bands, and that’s exactly why they stand out. Formed inside Area 51 during the global shutdown, the group has always felt less like a band and more like an art movement, one built on experimentation, cinematic imagination, and a refusal to obey conventional musical borders. Their sound is a living collage: electronica, jazz, classical phrasing, spoken-word musings, environmental textures, surrealist visuals, and a commitment to beauty in all its forms of serene, haunting, or downright unsettling.

The Uprights have never tried to blend in. Their mission has always been to blur the line between music and art, to create work that feels like an exhibition rather than a playlist. And Curse Of The Yellow Butterfly, the 2025 release chosen for BUZZMUSIC’s Best Independent Releases of 2025, is the clearest expression of that ethos to date.

The album isn’t just listened to, it’s entered. It surrounds you. It creates a world where sound becomes a sensory environment, where guitars ripple like strange weather, where vocals hover like memories, and where every arrangement carries an element of wonder, mystery, or danger. As Complex writer Brandon Constantine put it, their compositions don’t follow genre rules; they follow beauty. Whether that beauty is fragile, eerie, or terrifying is beside the point; what matters is the emotional awe it leaves behind.

2025 also marked a banner year for the collective. Their work caught the attention of publications like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Medium, Pitch Perfect, Vents Magazine, and more, all drawn to the band’s ability to create something that feels genuinely new in an industry that often leans toward imitation. Guitarist Rod earned a songwriting award from the Nashville Music Foundation; bassist John Thomas debuted a global photography exhibition; the group played stripped-back sets in Germany, Curacao, and Australia; and their music was featured in The Seven In One Way, a documentary exploring the Basque region of Spain.

What makes The Uprights so compelling is that their world expands beyond sound. Their visuals, concepts, and performances all stem from the same creative DNA, a willingness to get weird, dig deep, experiment loudly, and refuse to be defined by the expectations of others.

And as they prepare to release their next album, Death Of The White Dog, and negotiate with labels and streaming platforms for wider distribution, the band is stepping into their next evolution with the same energy that has carried them since day one: curiosity, intuition, and a commitment to art that challenges and mesmerizes.

At their core, The Uprights are a reminder of something essential: great art isn’t safe, predictable, or polished into submission. Great art is weird. It’s bold. It’s boundaryless. And if Curse Of The Yellow Butterfly proves anything, it’s that the world is more than ready for bands that dare to be all three.

Curse Of The Yellow Butterfly is the release you chose for our Best Independent Artists of 2025. What was the original spark or visual that set the tone for this album’s surreal, immersive world?

When The Uprights first came together, we were planning to be a jazz group. However, we soon realized that our shared interests in both art and experimental music could take us to some far more interesting and imaginative places. So I think that is what set the tone for Curse Of The Yellow Butterfly: a sense of artistic freedom and a willingness to push against the perceived boundaries of what a band can or should be.

Your sound blends electronica, jazz, classical, spoken word, field recordings, and cinematic elements, and somehow still feels cohesive. How do you approach composition when your “rules” are basically that there are no rules, except beauty?

The world itself is a chaotic blend of random and often conflicting elements. Every day we experience love and hate. Beauty and ugliness. Heart-warming kindness and savage cruelty. We see obscene wealth and wretched poverty. In the same way that all of those things coexist on our pale blue dot, we try to mold these disparate components into unified musical statements. I’m reminded of the words of Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Nice, nice, very nice. So many people in the same device.’

The Uprights were born inside Area 51 during the pandemic, a story that already sounds like its own myth. How did isolation, secrecy, and experimentation shape the band’s identity in those early stages?

For us, it is very important that we are artists, as opposed to rock stars. Therefore, we have taken great pains to remain anonymous. That way we don’t have to worry about fashion trends or hair styles, publicity tours or whether or not we are being seen in the hip clubs. We want the music and the art to be the focus, not our private escapades and shenanigans. Ironically, however, our desire for privacy seems to have fueled even more interest in the group. 

Brandon Constantine noted that you blur the line between music and art. What does “art” mean to The Uprights, and when do you know a piece has crossed from just sound into something more immersive and experiential?

We seem to be at our best when a song sort of bleeds over into real life. You can be listening to a nice groove, and suddenly, there is the sound of gunfire or a dog barking. This happens to people all the time, so we decided to incorporate it into our work. We also like to take quotes from movies or books, which help to express what it is that the song is trying to say, and put them into the piece. Even the natural sounds of wind, rain or traffic. What’s that noise? Is it on the recording? Is it coming from outside? We like that uncertainty. We want the listener to feel as if they are slowly slipping into another world. Somehow familiar and yet, alien.

2025 saw huge moments for the group: praise from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, Rod’s songwriting award, John Thomas’s photography exhibit, international acoustic shows, and your music being featured in a Basque documentary. What accomplishment from this year felt the most validating for your evolution as a collective?

The wonderful reviews that we have received from various music publications in the last year - including from BUZZMUSIC, by the way - have been incredibly gratifying. When we started down this path, we were just trying to amuse and entertain each other. There was no expectation that anyone outside the band would have any interest in, let alone praise for, this music. It turns out that maybe we weren’t crazy after all. There might still be people out there who are looking for something other than pre-packaged pop.

Death Of The White Dog is coming this December. What emotional or conceptual territory does this next album explore, and how does it expand or subvert what you started with Curse Of The Yellow Butterfly?

We definitely want to expand our horizons beyond what we did on the last album. We are incorporating some new musical styles and sounds. We are creating some longer pieces than we did on Curse Of The Yellow Butterfly and using more AI tools for both the music and the accompanying videos. In short, we just plan to keep exploring and pushing ourselves into new areas. As the saying goes, all of the good stuff is on the other side of your fear.

Your advice for artists is to stay weird as hell and define art on their own terms. What’s the weirdest creative risk you’ve taken as a band that unexpectedly paid off?

The decision to write, record, and release our last album was an incredibly risky move in and of itself. It was far and away the strangest music that any of us had ever worked on before. We had already finished a perfectly respectable jazz album (which I’m sure that we will release one day) that probably would have gotten some attention and praise from critics, but then we suddenly just walked away from it and said, ‘Let’s try something different…’ It was a ridiculous choice to make at the time, but it has paid off so far. Let your freak flag fly!