FIRST PRESS

Lost in the City put out a five-song EP called Every Comeback, A Sèance on October 31, 2025. The title reads like a mission statement for a band that has been around, in one form or another, since 2016. Nine months later they expanded it into a nine-song deluxe edition, and on September 18, 2026 they followed with "Dead Don't Dance," a four-minute single that Apple Music files under emo and the band's own Spotify page pins with the note "spooky season. new song to match!"

That is a lot of output for a self-released act. Every one of those records carries a "℗ Lost in the City" line and no label. The band is doing this on its own, from Kansas City, Missouri, and the Halloween framing is not a gimmick so much as a schedule.

Two bands, one name

The first version of Lost in the City was an alternative rock group. Shane Radford sang and played guitar, keys and synths, with Dustin Proctor on guitar, Cullan Wiley on bass and Kyle Constant on drums, the lineup the blog Eclectic Music Lover described in 2017 as "dynamic post-punk alternative rock." Their debut, Genesis, arrived in 2016. The follow-up, Leaving Home, was recorded with producer Bret Liber at Red Roof Productions and finally landed on October 12, 2018, a year after the band first said it was coming. Ten tracks, titles like "The Battle of Schrute Farms" and "The Upside Down," and the kind of big, pounding arrangements the reviewer called "sheer power and exuberance."

Then the output thinned to a single every couple of years: "Daylight" in 2018, "Young and Brave" in 2020. The Bandcamp page still lists the original four names.

The band that resurfaced in 2025 is Radford plus three new players: Tyler Hicks on guitar, Ellis Mays on bass and Andy Putonen on drums, per the band's EPK. The genre tag changed too. The EPK now says pop-punk and emo, names Fall Out Boy, blink-182 and My Chemical Romance as reference points, and promises "late-night memories and suburban heartbreak." The Spotify bio is blunter: "late nights, loud guitars, and whatever's left after everything else burns out."

The 2025-2026 run

Count the releases on Apple Music and the pace is clear. "Changing Directions," "Bunk Beds" and "Twilight of Summer" came out as singles in 2025 ahead of the EP. In 2026 the band dropped "Two States," "Say Anything," "Gator at a Punk Show," "Thursday Night at Johnny's (Neon Halos)," the deluxe EP in July, "Dead Don't Dance" in September and a single called "Ghostbusters." Song lengths sit between 3:45 and 4:28, long for pop-punk, which suggests the band is still carrying some of its alt-rock instincts into the new format.

"Dead Don't Dance" is the current calling card. It leads the band's popular-tracks list on Spotify, where the band sits at a little over 2,300 monthly listeners as of this writing, and it has a proper music video on the band's YouTube channel, posted in early October. For a group at this stage, a finished video with every single is more than most manage.

What to watch

The Halloween EP, the séance title, "Ghostbusters," a single about the dead not dancing: Lost in the City have found a seasonal lane and are working it. The question is whether the 2026 singles get collected into a full record, and whether the live side catches up with the release side. The band says on its EPK that it is "gearing up to bring their story" to bigger stages. The songs are already out. The stages are the next thing to prove.