Utopia PKWY – If I Could Steal One More Kiss

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Utopia PKWY, the new project of John Beckmann, songwriter, producer, and creative force behind The Mortal Prophets, releases its debut full-length LP, Debut, today. A sunlit departure from the shadowed interiors of The Mortal Prophets, Utopia PKWY finds Beckmann stepping away from the microphone entirely, handing vocal duties to collaborators Tanner McGraw and Lawson Mars. Written and produced entirely by Beckmann, the album explores longing, reinvention, escape, youth, and surreal American romanticism.

Alongside the album, Utopia PKWY shares focus track “If I Could Steal One More Kiss,” a groovy, psychedelic jam about memory, desire, and emotional transformation.

Watch the official video for “If I Could Steal One More Kiss” below.

“Perhaps falling in love and falling from grace are the same cosmic accident,” Beckmann shares. “The universe calls it gravity. The romantics call it destiny. Only the lovers know that both are hallucinations worth having.”

Named in reference to Utopia Parkway, the Queens street associated with Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, Utopia PKWY suggests a private universe assembled from memory, suburban light, damaged pop, and strange talismans. The music moves with the immediacy of a pop record while retaining the art-damaged intelligence of Beckmann’s broader catalog.

McGraw and Mars’ vocals bring freshness and emotional openness to Beckmann’s psychedelic architecture, giving the songs a sense of youthful motion and vulnerability. Echoes of Syd Barrett and Robert Wyatt surface in the album’s playful instability, while Cornell’s fascination with memory, maps, stars, and impossible little worlds quietly informs its emotional landscapes.

A thoroughly engaging blend of post-pop and synth-wave-infused psychedelia, Utopia PKWY moves beyond the darker atmosphere associated with Beckmann’s previous work into something warmer, stranger, and more melodic. Chrome-colored keyboards, warped hooks, sci-fi theremins, trippy sitars, and radiant melodies drift through richly layered arrangements that feel both cinematic and immediate. The album evokes suburban streets glowing in late-afternoon light — a world of synthetic drums, shimmering textures, and dreamlike momentum where nostalgia and futurism coexist.

Optimistic without becoming simple, sunny without becoming sentimental, and psychedelic without losing its architectural precision, Debut introduces a new dimension of Beckmann’s songwriting. McGraw’s vocals give the project a new center of gravity, while Mars’ backing vocals expand the songs with lift and shimmer. Beckmann constructs the sonic world around them, creating an album that feels simultaneously like a new band and an alternate dimension of The Mortal Prophets — a strange little universe where damaged pop, youthful possibility, and surreal American nostalgia coexist.

Listen to Debut here.

Utopia PKWY – Debut Tracklisting
1. I Knew You Were Trouble
2. Sleep In Moving Colors
3. Nothing Is Missing
4. If I Could Steal One More Kiss
5. You Talk Like Every Feeling
6. What Disappears
7. Come In Waves
8. Glitter And Doom
9. Fall Into You
10. Dreaming I’m A Rock Star