The opening of “Poisoned Seas” sits in birdsong before a metallic hardcore crawl drops in and flattens everything around it. The song moves slowly, gloom-soaked and heavy, the kind of weight that lands like a sledgehammer to the back of the head. Its sequel on the record, “Fervour,” picks up the dynamics. Both tracks bruise.
Omoiyari dropped “Poisoned Seas” on May 22 via A Cozy Death with no teasers, no run-up, no promotion. The single closes a four-song singles run from El Tyler’s debut Omoiyari album, “The View From Halfway Down,” now confirmed for June 19, 2026. Physicals are being pressed on PlayStation 2 disc, a first run El Tyler designed and built from scratch.
Tyler describes “Poisoned Seas” as the single that finally sets the tone of the album, with the jarringly heavy opening cutting through the birdsong. The track wasn’t even meant to be on the record. It was written second-to-last, originally intended for a follow-up EP alongside the album’s second track “Fervour.” Sitting with the album long enough pushed Tyler toward a sharper opener, and the song “just found it’s way into the narrative of the album, and of two years of learning, working, and pouring my soul into this project.” In their words, it became “THE song for the album.”
“Bleed” was originally the opening track. Tyler swapped it out partly because of how long ago it landed: “It’s been so long since BLEED came out I didn’t want people clocking out on track one, and with the birdsong opening it really just ended up slotting there perfectly.”
The choice between “Poisoned Seas” and a cleaner-vocal track with big choruses came down to a conversation with Tyler’s best friend Evan, who also shot the cover art. “[He] helped me decide in the end, or at least made me realise that the latter was moving away from the candour of what I’m doing,” Tyler says. “It’s not designed to be palatable.”
The opening verse hits within the first lines, sitting almost alone with the guitars dropped out so the words can land:
“I sold my soul to be / down with the willow trees / I fell with dying leaves / erased my face in search of peace”
Tyler reads the verse as a summary of the past few years. They lost a band that was starting to gain real traction. They lost a lot of mates. The interpersonal relationships they’d built over nearly a decade strained and shifted while they sat in what they call a poisoned sea, drowning in toxicity they couldn’t escape. Then the sea cleared. Tyler suddenly felt like they could breathe for the first time in years and realised a big factor in the weight was being “the face of a product almost,” known and seen for something that wasn’t who they actually were. The birdsong that opens both the single and the album sits on the other side of that.
But the stillness wasn’t enough on its own. The cathartic release of making music wasn’t there. “Forget My Face” came back as the album’s first single in a ferocious outburst after months of silence, and “Poisoned Seas” carries that same structural move: an aggressive wall of noise cutting through stillness. “I found a place and a way in which peace, serenity, and explosive catharsis could co-exists,” Tyler says.
“That’s where POISONED SEAS finds it home.”
The title is Icarian by design. The album name, “The View From Halfway Down,” sits in the same myth. Tyler keeps circling Icarus, but recasts the fall as something productive. They describe a stretch where no number of streams, views, or stats was enough: working full time alongside a 30-hour-a-week voluntary internship, and trying to find time to write music, attend practices, record, play shows. They burned out. That was the fall. Even after the contemplation that followed, it felt like drowning in a space they needed to get out of. “I’m taking all that I need / I’ll start again from poisoned seas.”
Two other lyric blocks Tyler highlights. The first:
“And when the flowers grow from seeds I died to sow, I’ll find a resting place in undergrowth”
Tyler builds a strong juxtaposition between flowers, nature, and death. Something beautiful coming from tragedy and loss. They’re not sure rest is the ultimate goal (“Probably not, I’d go insane”), but finding peace with where they are might be. Willow trees, leaves, flowers, seeds: an effigy for the peaceful, more introspective side of Tyler that contrasts with the violently screaming, table-climbing version people saw onstage.
The second:
“You can find me in twisting trees / ensnared in the roots of your judgment / hanging for all to see / a puppet controlled by a puppet”
A heavy reference to Odin’s sacrifice on Yggdrasil. Nine days and nine nights of agony in an attempt to change fate, to gain power. Tyler turns the myth into a question: “Was everything I lost in the last few years worth where I’m at now? Or was it all just destined to happened anyways and not worth worrying about? Who knows? But I think its healthy to ask.”
The album was made in Tyler’s bedroom over two years, on an audio interface they pulled out of a skip. It went through three or four full forms. At one point the DAW corrupted and took a substantial portion of the album with it. Tyler saw it as the end of the project. Then they switched to a new DAW, re-recorded “Bleed” from scratch and put it out, and scrapped the rest. Some of that unreleased stuff is still on the table for later.
“I don’t have professional standard gear, I’m not a professional producer with a huge home studio hidden in my garden. I have an interface I saved from a skip and shit tonne of passion. This is true DIY. There were no decisions made based on what a traditional producers knowledge would dictate, and with that everything is deliberate.”
That extends to the song’s opening. The guitars drop out under the first verse on purpose. The words had to dig in. The same logic carries the rest of the record. Nine tracks moving through styles depending on what the writing needs, not what a genre expects. “Don’t go into this expecting a genre, go into this expecting a deliberate spanning of different styles to represent exactly what the lyrics are about. This is an album about passion, feeling, candour, and honesty.”
The tracklist itself moved around about forty times. Tyler kept tweaking, reordering, pushing standards. The PS2 disc packaging carries small details and hidden references hand-built into the sleeve and disc, easter eggs throughout. Tyler talks about wanting their small but committed fanbase to have something on par with the music. “I’m a story teller at heart.”
“Poisoned Seas” dropped out of silence on May 22, almost mirroring the opening of the song itself. Tyler wanted space between this and the previous single, but not enough to lose momentum. “I’ve been talking about the album for enough years that its finally time for people to hear it. Maybe we could call it OMOIYARI summer.”
“The View From Halfway Down” lands June 19 via A Cozy Death.
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