Longboat has never been interested in writing love songs. That absence isn’t a gimmick or a provocation — it’s a position. In a recent Instagram post, Igor Keller laid it out with clarity: “Topics I’ve Written About That Aren’t Love.” What followed was a catalog of modern anxieties — imaginary monsters, manufactured panic, collapsing authority, fear sold as reassurance. Not love songs. Just the systems we live inside.
Since its earliest releases, Longboat has treated songwriting like observation. Across albums centered on technology, the Cold War, and even the semi-fictional life of a musician uncomfortably close to himself, Longboat frames the world as something unstable, always on the verge of revealing its absurdity.
In Longboat’s world of pop power isn’t dramatized, it’s examined up close until it starts to look ridiculous. Panic isn’t explosive, it’s staged, repeated, and exposed as entertainment. Authority doesn’t fall with a crash; it thins out quietly as the spectacle continues.
Keller has been explicit about why love never enters the picture. “Being creative is about trying to express things that haven’t yet been expressed,” he explains. Against that logic, love songs, and their familiar cousins, heartbreak and loneliness, can feel exhausting. When there is an entire world of subjects demanding attention, returning to the same emotional loops feels, in his words, “childish and silly.”
Instead, Longboat gravitates toward the uncomfortable middle space: systems pretending they’re in control, absurd solutions to serious problems, etc. These themes aren’t treated as dystopian warnings so much as everyday realities. The monsters Keller writes about are imaginary, but they feel uncomfortably real because they’re built from recognizable parts — headlines, talking points, public rituals of reassurance.
What makes Longboat compelling isn’t that the Igor Keller avoids love, but that he refuses distraction. The music suggests that creativity still has work to do beyond emotional recycling. In Keller’s world, pretending everything is fine is the real fantasy.
