Introducing The Chalkeaters
The Chalkeaters
Toying with Form & Content.
Alternative music styles survive on refusal—especially of tidy conclusions. Always seeking to outpace the limitations of traditional means, it thrives on the collisions of ideas, communities, and environments. Here, things crash, roar, fracture, and get pieced back together. "I'm here," loud enough to scuff the paint from the walls, becomes a process that, on symbolic and metaphysical levels, reflects the increasingly tangled dynamics of modern life.
Alexander Serebro (b. 1993), a.k.a. Alios, belongs to the new generation unafraid to fuse genres, forms, and meanings, a rock operator with a taste for impact over ornament. In 2012, he started BroniKoni, a band that initially covered animation themes but soon transitioned to original work. Their album "Friendship Express" (2018), written entirely by Serebro, skips harmonic wanderings. It's physical, unfiltered. It pounds like a strobe light switched on inside your skull. As a musician, Serebro approaches relatively economical tools, perhaps deliberately limiting himself to stay faithful to his aim: injecting energy into every track. BroniKoni plays in bursts of pressure, relying on raw expression and the physicality of sound. They throw the brick—whether you catch it or it knocks you down.
The Chalkeaters appeared the same year, a side door Serebro kicked open. As a band—part animation studio, part meme machine, part rock act —they deliver ironic snapshots of modern life's issues and pseudo-issues alike. Fueled by TV shows, video games, and movies, The Chalkeaters riff on whatever's brewing in pop culture.
Breaking through to a broad audience was impossible for The Chalkeaters without Tim Maslov, co-author of the music and the band's sound engineer. Catching the nerve of the times—or spotting what feels new, setting the mood—is its own kind of trick. Maslov's style runs on intensity and charge, enough to keep the band sounding current, often tipping towards polish.
In 2020 came The Chalkeaters' breakout hit 'Doom Crossing: Eternal Horizons', a Frankenstein splice of two wildly different video‑game narratives, stitched together with plinky ukulele lines and a monstrous doom-metal growl. Within a week, the video had reached a million views; today, it has surpassed seventy million.
Beneath the noise, Serebro is refining the same tool: the push-pull between the outside world's chaos and the inner, intimate terrain of human emotion. Through music and a personal connection with sound, he gives energy back to the world. The structures are quick-breathing, expressive, and developing at high speeds, yet deceptively simple.
He toys with form and content—music as a process you grow through, as an intellectual game, as a decorative noise backdrop, or as fuel for other experiences. Everything at once. Most of all, this restless engine drives him toward a sharper cultural reflection—one that, judging from the response, connects with the sensibilities of the "new" listener. It expands their sense of experience, not just for its own sake, but to relate it to something grander. That, stripped of pretence and ornament, might be the music.
Written by Il Gurn