Dren McDonald is known to us as an instrumental composer and we’ve previously featured his two video game soundtracks Stay: Forever Home Vol. 1: Chaos and Vol. 2: Cozy in 2025 and 2026.
By Graeme Smith
His new project is a little different – a rework of his 2023 record Pterous with added vocals. Named, appropriately enough, Vox Pterous it gives us plenty to chew over. Technically an EP, the unhurried approach of its six tracks makes it feel more like an LP.
I found a unique tension in these compositions. The instrumentals are dynamic, built around a ‘guitar orchestra’ and combining elements of jazz, folk, and acoustic, all with a gentle relentlessness and restlessness. The vocals, however, urge us to slow down through their soft and ghostly delivery.
McDonald works with a host of voices across the record, some of whom are known to us through the Stay: Forever Home soundtracks. Amelie Anna is the first we hear during the looping opener Anchors Up. Carla Kihlstedt joins in on Resting of Light.
Aviator Eyes, a mid-record highlight, features the talents of Girl Swallows Nightingale and Paula Frazer. The introduction of soft math rock elements and blissful, overspilling layered vocals makes it stand out.
The dramatic The Things He Could Bury precedes the soulful melancholy of She’s The Sky featuring Lily Bloom and Daria Novo. Fading serves us some final, soothing balm, and we hear the voice of Sophia James
Vox Pterous is a fascinating project that shows us McDonald’s ear for composition beyond the video game soundtrack genre. It also shows a talent for lyric writing, giving us plenty of atmospheric poetry to unpick.
McDonald explains that each track was written as a dedication to someone he’d lost over a three-year period. “Sometimes the only way to work through grief like that is to make something,” he wrote of the songs.
Based in San Francisco, USA, McDonald has been releasing music as a solo artist and as part of his collaboration project, polyheDren, since 2014. He’s worked with the likes of John Freese (Foo Fighters/NIN), Nels Cline (Wilco), and The Residents, and his music has been celebrated by the LA Times, Electronica UK, and, of course, us.
If you want to keep up to date with all that Dren McDonald is doing, you can by heading to his website and following him on Bluesky and YouTube.
Vox Pterous is out now, and you can listen to it below.
