A feverish, seven-and-a-half-minute odyssey through chaos and clarity, Anthony Ruptak’s “PHANTASMAGORIA” is an apocalyptic indie rock reckoning – a raw, unflinching reflection on modern disconnection, human fragility, and the desperate search for meaning in a world on fire.
Stream: “PHANTASMAGORIA” – Anthony Ruptak
It’s a crazy goddamn hell of a mess we made…
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Anthony Ruptak’s words hit hard and leave a lasting mark on our collective soul.
They’re a personal and communal confession, but not an absolution – rather, an indictment of our actions and our inactions. His voice bears a world-weary weight of exhaustion and fury, a perfect distillation of everything that’s come undone in our “modern” times – a technological malaise. Across seven and a half minutes of feverish, slow-burning indie rock, “PHANTASMAGORIA” erupts in raw, restless catharsis, capturing the chaos of a world teetering on its own collapse. It’s wild, unrelenting, and devastatingly human – a soundtrack for our doom-scrolling age, where despair meets defiance and apocalypse becomes art.
At its core, “PHANTASMAGORIA” is an anthem for the apocalypse – a mirror held up to the madness, and a cry to feel something real before the world goes numb.
it’s been both a short time
and a very, very long time too
i got a feelin’
i’ll walk til my heart stops
making space for the next man’s shoes
it’s gonna have to do
well it’s a crazy goddamn
hell of a mess we made
it’s a shot rock, stopped clock,
hell of a bleak parade
it’s a long line, wrong mind,
liminal dime arcade
it’s a crazy goddamn
hell of a mess we made
In a world unraveling at the seams, “PHANTASMAGORIA” doesn’t offer comfort – it demands confrontation, forcing us to look at what we’ve made, and what’s left to save.
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “PHANTASMAGORIA,” the sprawling, seven-and-a-half-minute epic from Colorado indie rocker Anthony Ruptak. Taken from his forthcoming album Tourist (out November 7, 2025), this visceral, unfiltered, emotionally charged track stands as the record’s explosive centerpiece – a furious meditation on connection, collapse, and the cost of our collective complacency.
A longtime staple of Denver’s music scene, Ruptak has built a reputation for writing songs that balance introspection with sweeping cinematic scope.
His fifth studio album, Tourist continues that thread, moving between existential unrest and fleeting transcendence. Written during quiet hours between his shifts as a paramedic, the album bears witness to the human condition in all its fragile beauty and chaos.
it’s hardly enough time
to get a sense of what makes you
you’re likely to miss it
getting snagged in your lifelines
using up near the whole damn spool
you’re such a beautiful misfit
“‘Phantasmagoria’ is a broad collection of ruminations on the overall state of the world in the year 2025,” Ruptak tells Atwood Magazine. “As we try to navigate our roles and responsibilities during a time of rapid, volatile change, we become beaten down and desensitized to the massive scale of suffering taking place on this shared, warming planet.”
“People are lonely, fatigued, and scared,” he continues. “We grapple each day with chronic doom-scrolling and feelings of inadequacy and helplessness, watching the world burn from our phones, while the ultra-wealthy amass seemingly infinite capital, while the poor become poorer and the powers-that-be continue to decimate the planet. It’s an anthem for the apocalypse.”
That feeling of decay – personal, political, planetary – seeps through every line and riff.
Ruptak’s voice trembles between grit and grace as he rails against complacency: “It’s a cheap-shot, tik-tok, weapon of mass decay, it’s a blue pill, phone bill, throwing it all away…” The arrangement unfurls like a stormfront, building from hushed strumming into a crescendo of drums, strings, horns, and electric catharsis. It’s the sound of someone clawing their way toward clarity, even as the ground gives way beneath them.
well it’s a crazy goddamn hell of a mess we made
it’s a cheap-shot, tik-tok, weapon of mass decay
it’s a blue pill, phone bill, throwing it all away
it’s a crazy goddamn hell of a mess we made
The word phantasmagoria originates from the 18th Century, referring to a sequence of shifting illusions or dreamlike images projected in rapid succession. Over time, it’s come to represent any surreal montage – a blur between the real and the imagined, where boundaries dissolve and chaos feels strangely coherent. In Ruptak’s hands, “Phantasmagoria” becomes both a metaphor and a mirror: A way of describing the disorienting swirl of modern life, where information, tragedy, and distraction collide in a nonstop scroll of sensation. We’re inundated by imagery, unable to discern what’s real, what’s filtered, and what’s simply noise.
When Ruptak repeats “phantasmagorical haze” in the song’s final stretch, it lands like both a surrender and an awakening – a recognition of how deeply we’ve slipped into this dream-state of overstimulation. The haze is beautiful and horrifying, a fog we’ve built ourselves out of pixels and panic. In this context, the title isn’t just an aesthetic flourish; it’s the song’s thesis. “PHANTASMAGORIA” captures the dizzying unreality of living in 2025 – where our collective anxiety, fear, and fatigue blur into one endless, looping image reel. Ruptak doesn’t try to dispel the illusion; he holds us inside it, asking what it means to stay awake in a world that’s half-dreaming, half-dying.
don’t you think that i look cool
swimmin’ round in the gene pool, babe?
ain’t i got something to say
i’m hanging on to the old school
but won’t you show me
all your cool new ways
that we can pass the days
phantasmagorical haze
phantasmagorical haze
The accompanying music video, directed by Anthony Ruptak and Cole Naylor, brings the song’s tension and turbulence to life with simple, haunting imagery.
Ruptak appears as two selves: One tethered to modern distraction – scrolling endlessly through his phone, lost in digital noise – and another unleashed in the wilderness, alive and unburdened. With his aviator glasses, windblown quiff, and unmistakably large mustache (a younger sort of cross between Marc Maron and Jeff Tweedy), he carries a kind of everyday mystique – the look of a man who’s seen too much, yet still can’t look away. The contrast is stark and poignant: Civilization’s comfort versus nature’s raw truth. At one point, the “plugged-in” Ruptak is buried alive, eyes still locked to his screen as dirt piles over him. You can almost feel the soil against his skin as he’s buried alive, phone in hand – a grim portrait of our quiet complicity. By the time he’s reborn on a mountaintop, the world below him is erupting in nuclear bloom. He’s found freedom, but too late.
As one of the most striking moments on Tourist, “PHANTASMAGORIA” crystallizes the record’s larger themes of fragility, disillusionment, and endurance. Written in the in-between spaces of Ruptak’s life as a paramedic – after the sirens fade, when the world feels eerily still – the album traces the quiet aftermath of chaos, transforming lived moments of care and collapse into something universal, searching, and painfully human, finding fleeting transcendence in the rubble. In the nine months leading up to its release, Ruptak unveiled other four singles – “Trauma Naked,” “Tourist,” “XONM,” and “Ptarmigan” – each offering another layer of the album’s emotional landscape and underscoring just how much time, energy, and heart he’s poured into this body of work.
Visually and sonically, “PHANTASMAGORIA” captures the dissonance of living in 2025 – hyperconnected yet deeply alone, informed yet powerless.
And yet, what’s most staggering is how Ruptak keeps us hooked for all seven and a half minutes – a runtime longer than “Hotel California” and “Comfortably Numb,” just shy of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Free Bird.” That kind of endurance requires more than clever arrangement; it takes presence. His voice carries the weight of it all – aching, impassioned, and emotive, channeling those raw, visceral, tumultuous feelings inside him with effortless grit and a kind of charming churn. Each verse feels earnest and lived-in, every breath a radiant and resounding reckoning. By the time the final refrain hits, you’re not just listening to a song – you’re living inside its fire, its fury, and its fragile hope.
It’s not a song built for easy listening; it’s an experience meant to shake you awake. It’s a crazy goddamn hell of a mess we made, and it’s up to us to clean up our act and reverse course before it’s too late – if there’s still time left. With its cinematic length and feral urgency, Ruptak invites us to linger in discomfort, to sit with the mess we’ve made, and maybe, somehow, to start making something better.
In a world addicted to short attention spans, this is a song that demands time – and earns every second of it. Anthony Ruptak’s “PHANTASMAGORIA” is both a reckoning and a release, a reminder that awareness is its own act of resistance. Watch the music video exclusively on Atwood Magazine, join Anthony Ruptak on this extraordinary journey when Tourist arrives November 7!
well it’s a crazy goddamn hell of a mess we made
it’s a white collar crime, lithium mine,
last of the last crusades
it’s a blue line, good time,
less lethal hand grenade
it’s a crazy goddamn hell of a mess we made
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:: stream/purchase Tourist here ::
:: connect with Anthony Ruptak here ::
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Stream: “PHANTASMAGORIA” – Anthony Ruptak
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© Angela Bakas
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