Victoryland is the Brooklyn-based project of musician Julian McCamman and Dan Howard. Their 2026 album, My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It, is a triumphant, despondent, and ultimately fun experimental pop-rock album. A year on, the record receives the deluxe treatment from new label home Dead Oceans. My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It (Deluxe) arrives December 11th, 2026, on exclusive crystal clear vinyl, complete with new song “The Ugliest Girl On The Beach” and a new music video for album standout “I got god.”

The sound of the album, recorded between Julian’s Bed-Stuy basement and Dan’s Williamsburg studio, is that of a bright and beaming collaboration. Blending lo-fi and hi-fi production, the songs have the glossiness of a radio-friendly hit mixed with the distortion and rough edges of a home demo. Every song keeps at least one element of the initial recording, while building around the loops and half-songs Julian scraped together. The lyrics on the record span from humorous self-aware popisms (“‘you and I’ will soon be, used to be ‘us’”) to crushing realities of bitterness (“i’ll never forgive you, that’s how I keep you close”) and abstract imagery (“mothers wave from doorways, in ostinato”), all delivered with such an immediacy and fervor that in the middle of singing along, you wonder if this guy slept much last night.

My Heart wrangles with heavy subject matter – love, disconnection, sexual frustration, emptiness – but the final statement of the record is about the cleansing nature of pop music. That, if a song can force you to bliss out over a hook or a loop, or even make you dance, it can be the spoonful of sugar to swallow the hard pill with. This is what Victoryland strives to do: package the most exhausting realities of life, love, and the search for connection in a world starved of it into a fun 2-5 minutes. And for the runtime of Victoryland’s first major statement, you might even feel like you’re not alone.

Victoryland as a project originated in Philly in 2023, with their first tape, Sprain, arriving in 2024, which echoed more of what the Philly scene was dishing out: lo-fi, tape-recorded rock with a capital R. It was the collaborative efforts of producer Dan Howard that brought the new vision and sound into full focus. Dan and Julian had previously worked together on Loving You Backwards by Julian’s Texas-to-Philly-based band Blood - that experience pushed Julian toward a more personal process of recording, starting with home demos and then bringing them to Dan to shape into songs together. This relationship ultimately led Julian to move to New York, and the recording of My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It.

Much to their surprise, My Heart’s release ushered Victoryland into a whirlwind of a year. Pitchfork praised the album’s “bright, madcap approach reminiscent of the New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Some Loud Thunder.” Stereogum named it their Album of the Week and proclaimed it “a surprisingly cohesive scrapbook of sounds from seemingly every corner of the indie pop umbrella.” The album also received support from Steve Lamacq at BBC 6 Music and Sian Eleri at Radio 1. After a string of sold-out shows in NYC, Victoryland later joined LCD Soundsystem on their North American tour and performed at Pitchfork London, Pitchfork Paris, among other festivals across Europe.