On the Rise
Victoryland

We spend the first few minutes troubleshooting audio and the image cutting in and out before it settles. It’s an unintentional moment that we are more often used to operating in a digital landscape, but one that mirrors the tension at the centre of Victoryland’s music and second record, My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It. It’s a constant reach toward connection, even when the conditions for it feel unstable or out of sync.

What Victoryland offers is a soothing sense of vulnerability that extends to the album’s core themes. While the title My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It suggests privacy, or something withheld or protected, the songs themselves feel the opposite lyrically. In the lead single “No Cameras”, McCamman frantically sings, “If you and I are dumb enough for god, then you and I are dumb enough for love,” as if trying to convince both himself and someone just out of reach. Across the record, that vulnerable ache surfaces again and again, as an effort that, despite everything, there’s still an attempt to connect, to be understood, to try. “It’s about the struggle to fight for a real connection between people,” he says. “That’s not something you can just glean from images of somebody.”

Before Victoryland, McCamman was a member of Philadelphia-based project Blood – a project that, by his own account, had begun to stall under its own weight. “I just knew the way we were operating wasn’t creatively fulfilling to any of us, nor creatively productive,” he says. “It didn’t have that momentum. But when I left, it was hard as my life was very intertwined in that band and I loved everybody a lot.” The band’s collaborative structure, once generative, had started to feel restrictive, with too many decisions filtered through too many voices. “It felt like we were making a lot of compromises because you have so many people. A lot of people in the studio were kind of calling the shots and I wanted to make strong creative decisions. It informed my desire for things [with Victoryland] to be very minimal.”

Despite these challenges, Victoryland’s earliest iteration existed alongside Blood, with overlapping members and shared ideas. One track in particular, “Arcades”, marked a turning point, eventually carrying into Victoryland with its core intact. Lines like “In my dreams, I see you / We fuck without saying a word” linger in a space of longing that is so vulnerable, yet subtle amongst the mix, that it makes you double-take on whether you heard the line correctly. Originally conceived within the band, it was rejected. “I was like, this idea is so good, y’all are tripping out,” McCamman recalls. “It felt important for me to make accessible-feeling music.”

McCamman’s instinct to trust his ideas became foundational to his work. He reminisces on how leaving Blood was a decision that was both overdue and difficult. “My life was very intertwined in that band,” he says. “But it was the right move.” He soon felt the urge to relocate to New York, shift his creative output, and narrow his creative circle. “People in New York are more enthusiastic about music. There’s a fervour to work a lot on music that I love,” he laughs. “But it also kind of builds workaholics.” 

We reflect on the supportive music scene in New York, as I had just returned from New Colossus, a showcase festival on the Lower East Side, and experienced how the city’s DIY infrastructure still feels unusually intact, with a network of artists and organizers more interested in building something than posturing around it. “New York gets a bad rep for all the shitty things it produces, music-wise, art-wise, but there are so many people doing amazing things,” pointing to the abrasiveness of YHWH Nailgun as inspiration, alongside local projects like Or Best Offer and Fernette. It’s a context that suits Victoryland, despite the misconceptions that it’s McCamman’s solo project.

Victoryland, in its current form, may be a reduction compared to the six collaborators he was used to in Blood, but he’s quick to position producer Dan Howard as an integral extension of the project. Howard, whose work threads through the New York music scene, including his new-wave band Family Vision, helped bring an element of collaboration to Victoryland that McCamman didn’t want to lose after leaving Blood. “It’s really 50-50 between Dan and me,” he says. “Meeting him is what made the record sound the way it did.” Alongside Howard, McCamman also works closely with his brother, Benjamin McCamman-McGinnis, whose production and writing contributions add another layer to the project’s evolving shape.

That partnership reshapes not just the sound, but the process itself. Where earlier work fixated on guitar tones and arrangement details, Howard introduces a different way of thinking that places the song, rather than its components, at the centre. “There’s this thing in the middle that is the song,” McCamman explains. “Everything should be supporting that abstract middle. It just totally changed my brain. Meddling over a guitar tone is not really something we do anymore. If it sounds good, it sounds good, and we’re thinking about the big picture and if it works for the song as a whole. It clears the way for the listener to really experience it.” 

Part of the change also stems from McCamman’s growing confidence. His 2024 album, Sprain, presents more vocally subdued, favouring ambitious, noisy melodies. “I was just kind of scared of it,” he says. “I didn’t love the way my voice sounded.” That discomfort manifests in the mix, whereas his 2025 release presents a more mature, self-assured vision. “I didn’t care about sounding cool anymore,” he adds. “I didn’t even feel cool. So I was like, why am I pretending? I don’t feel like that guy that I’m pretending to be, so let’s write the most basic pop song I can and just give it my all and not be afraid if my music isn’t head or chin scratching or conceptual enough. I didn’t really care anymore.”

It’s a subtle shift, but it changes everything. On My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It, the density of earlier recordings gives way to something more direct. Vocals move forward in the mix. Hooks are allowed to land without noise or interference. The instinct to obscure or complicate is replaced with a willingness to be understood. McCamman leads with a strain of wiry, rhythm-forward guitar music and a restless, talk-sung delivery that sits comfortably within a lineage of New York artists, calling back to the mid-2000s. After listening to the album on repeat, I felt inspired to brush up on LCD Soundsystem, the unfiltered, diaristic edge I’ve come to love in Car Seat Headrest’s music, alongside the off-kilter synths that bring early Animal Collective to mind, and noticed how comfortably it sat in the mix. 

But what gives McCamman an edge is the unfiltered lyrical realisations that inspire the listener to look inward. McCamman’s focus remains on resisting over-defining the work, preferring to let meaning emerge in use. Singles like “I’ll Show You Mine” carry a stream-of-consciousness lyricism, with one-liners that McCamman throws at the listener and sticks due to its obscure sincerity: “It’s just me and you / and you eat me like some rare and delicate bird / now what’s the word / that people say when they are desperate for a touch / like a starved animal.” “If you let yourself say the thing that’s inside you,” he says, “you will say what you need to say.”

McCamman describes the songs as “windows to a feeling,” with the goal being to “get out of the way a little bit and let the feeling shine.” It’s a practical philosophy that shapes the emotional direction of the recording at every level. Even still, there’s an insistence on turning disconnection into something communal. Live shows, in particular, become an extension of that idea and a way to translate those tensions into something shared, opting for poets who did live readings as his openers at his recent album launch show in Brooklyn. “The shows are kind of a manifestation of what the music feels like it’s about,” he says. “Which is just being in the same room with each other. We can take these feelings of disconnection and turn them inside out and find connection through music.”

That emphasis on experience carries into Victoryland’s visual world as well. The video for “Fits”, assembled with friends in a single hallway dancing and playing instruments amongst flickering lights, avoids heavy concepts in favour of something more immediate. “How you make something is directly connected to what it is you’re making,” McCamman says. The result is deliberately loose, feeling part house party, part solitary loop, with fragments of text layered over the footage, plucked from poetry saved in McCamman’s notes app in his phone.

McCamman is not standing in the way of Victoryland’s momentum. While there are plans for more shows, more releases, and the continuation of the partnership that shaped the current record, McCamman is not concerned about maintaining a throughline between the past and present releases. “I think the important thing is to keep getting into the muck of making it and then figuring out what it is after. I think we just want to be guided by our intuition.” If the record contemplates the idea of human connection, there’s something in the way McCamman expresses it that counteracts isolation. In an attempt to reach outward, it lands with the listener, in a live room, or in the simple act of passing their songs between friends. With Victoryland, that feeling becomes shared.