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Kevin Smeltzer Announces New Album Fabricated Worlds
Kevin Smeltzer will release his upcoming album Fabricated Worlds on June 12, 2026, introducing a vivid, genre-crossing collection that transforms mortality, identity, self-invention, and emotional awakening into a richly arranged world of pop, jazz, classical, and electronic sound. Created in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with a large cast of local collaborators, the album marks both a long-awaited artistic arrival and a deeply personal act of creative release.
At its core, Fabricated Worlds is an album about the stories people build around themselves — the personas, fears, desires, defenses, and illusions that can feel real until life forces them to crack open. Across the record, Smeltzer moves through anxiety, impermanence, self-doubt, love, and acceptance, building what he describes as a kind of necessary clearing-out of the musical and emotional identities that have shaped him.
“This album, for me, was kind of like an exorcism of all the musicians that I had wanted to be, or pretend to be, or copied,” Smeltzer says. “There was something I had to get out of the way before I could work on other stuff.”
The album’s first single, “Unsurvivable,” offers a bold entry point into that world. Bright, hook-driven, and danceable, the song confronts mortality with motion rather than despair. Smeltzer has described the track with the phrase, “Nobody gets out of life alive; dance while you can,” a sentiment that captures the album’s larger emotional logic: life is fragile, strange, and temporary, but that is exactly why it must be lived with urgency.
“Unsurvivable” is one of several songs on Fabricated Worlds that grapples with impermanence. Smeltzer says many of the songs carry the awareness that “I’m going to die soonish” somewhere beneath the surface, even when the music itself is playful, theatrical, or pop-forward. Rather than becoming heavy-handed, the album uses that awareness as a charge, a reason to move, create, connect, and let go.
Another key track, “Imposter,” turns the album’s philosophical inquiry inward. The song explores the strange inner voice that can seem to operate independently inside the mind, generating doubt, false identity, and self-sabotage. “That really talks about that voice that’s kind of living its own life inside of your head,” Smeltzer says. Within the album’s broader arc, “Imposter” functions as a confrontation with the fabricated self, the mental narrator that often mistakes itself for truth.
“Take Advantage of Me” introduces a relational dimension to the record’s search for freedom. Beneath its title is a meditation on love, change, and the ways people can serve as catalysts for one another’s growth without being able to possess or preserve each other in one fixed form. The song reflects one of the album’s recurring concerns: how human beings are always becoming, even inside the relationships that seem to define them.
The album closes with “Alone,” a track Smeltzer identifies as a point of acceptance. “That’s the closer because it’s really just about acceptance,” he says. “About getting into a state where you can just accept things as they are.” After the record’s movement through fear, illusion, desire, and transformation, “Alone” offers not a grand resolution but a quieter landing: the possibility of meeting life as it is.
Musically, Fabricated Worlds is as layered as its themes. Smeltzer’s background includes classical trombone, jazz studies, voice, piano, composition, and years of intense listening to artists ranging from The Beatles and Harry Connick Jr. to George Michael, classical virtuosos, jazz players, and the pop music of the ’80s and ’90s. Those influences surface throughout the album, but not as simple homage. Instead, they form the raw material of a personal reckoning.
Smeltzer first sketched many of the songs in notation software, creating score-based MIDI drafts rather than building tracks inside a contemporary digital audio workstation. “I showed up to the studio with these MIDI files with bleepy, bloopy computer sounds,” he says. From there, the songs were developed with a Thunder Bay producer into fuller arrangements that combine electronic programming, synth textures, live instrumentation, and collaborative performance.
The recording process eventually grew to include more than two dozen local musicians, including symphony players, jazz musicians, bassists, drummers, and other Thunder Bay contributors. For Smeltzer, involving the local community became one of the project’s defining elements. “I wanted to get a lot of local musicians involved,” he says. “Thunder Bay is a small place, and it still kind of feels like a small town.”
The result is an album that balances constructed sound with human presence. Even when the arrangements lean into electronic color, Fabricated Worlds remains grounded in live musicianship and real-time collaboration. “There was also a lot of live musicianship that happened, which I really enjoyed,” Smeltzer says.
Though Fabricated Worlds is Smeltzer’s first full-length release, it carries the weight of a lifetime of musical immersion. His earliest memories involve trying to reproduce melodies on a small home organ, despite growing up in a family that did not play music. Later came trombone, classical ambition, jazz study in Vancouver, and eventually a move away from music toward software development. Yet the songs never disappeared.
Health challenges in recent years helped bring the album into focus. When a professional studio opened in Thunder Bay, Smeltzer felt the timing was impossible to ignore. “I thought, ‘I’m making an album because I’m gonna die soonish, and there’s a studio here,’” he says. “Once I decided that, it all just kind of became really easy.”
With Fabricated Worlds, Kevin Smeltzer turns that decision into a vibrant, searching, and emotionally candid debut. It’s a record about waking up inside the worlds we invent, and dancing before they disappear.