Weird Music Weds: “Seth’s Tune” by The Destroyers

A Twelve-Headed Hydra of Joyful Mayhem

Dec 10, 2025

The Destroyers’ fourth studio album, Argonaut, is a declaration of war on musical complacency. Hailing from Birmingham, this twelve-piece “prog-folk” behemoth has somehow managed to bottle the frenzied, glorious chaos of a Balkan-Klezmer-Gypsy-Rock wedding band that just discovered fusion jazz and decided to play it all at once. If your taste is limited to gentle, acoustic singer-songwriters, then, bless your tidy no-show socks, you may need a nap after listening to this. For the rest of us, it’s a magnificent, dizzying sonic carnival.

The band’s name, The Destroyers, is surprisingly apt, as they ruthlessly dismantle genre barriers with a cavalier attitude that is both virtuosic and wonderfully ridiculous. You’ve got fiddles, brass, winds, accordion, and a rhythm section that sounds like it’s trying to audition for a spot in late era Yes. It’s the kind of music that forces your limbs to move in ways they haven’t since that one time when you were forced to attend your boss’s son’s bar mitzvah. The icing on this weird cake are the few tracks with spoken word vocals that actually tell the tales the music can only insinuate.

Highlights include the delightfully named, complex tracks like “Sandansko Horo” (which sounds like an epic chase scene across the desert plains of Tatooine) and “Hanga Honga” (or “De wanna wanga” also for Star Wars fans). Through it all, the music is a whirlwind of dizzying time signatures and unexpected melodic detours, proving that joy and complexity are not mutually exclusive.

For me, the most spectacular gem in Argonaut‘s treasure chest is the track “Seth’s Tune,” whose blueprint I imagine is scrawled on a napkin somewhere and reads: “Make it complicated, but make ‘em boogie.” It kicks off with a blistering, full-throttle Balkan gypsy gallop. The sheer speed and precision of the fiddles and woodwinds is frankly showing off, but in the most charming way. It immediately establishes a glorious, breakneck pace that dares you to keep up. Then, about halfway through, they suddenly drop the entire whirling dervish into a surprisingly tight and completely unexpected free jazz section (reference Flea’s “A Plea” from earlier this week). “Seth’s Tune” is an entire musical odyssey (see what I did there) compressed into four minutes and nineteen seconds of technical mastery, genre collision, and sheer, unapologetic fun.