Claudio Sanchez, the lead singer/guitarist for Coheed & Cambria, has a solo side project called The Prize Fighter Inferno. The first Prize Fighter album, My Brother’s Blood Machine, came out in 2006 as a kind of acoustic electro, weirdly folk album. It was meant to be kind of a side story to the grandiose sci-fi story being told with Coheed & Cambria’s music and was a nice lighter offering to the face melting that is Coheed. Since that time, Claudio has gone full synth sequencing with Autotuned vocals and it’s pretty glorious. This is the official second album called The City Introvert, recorded during pandemic lockdowns.

A lot of these songs have been released on their own over the last year. While it doesn’t feel as cohesive as the first Prize Fighter album, I still enjoy a lot of these songs. I think the biggest difference is that My Brother’s Blood Machine felt incredibly risky at the time. This album? Not so much. It’s not that Claudio is a bad songwriter, it’s just that he didn’t push the envelope on this one. I want my envelopes off the table, baby.

The honest truth is that after I finished listening, I had almost zero urge to start the album over again. I will listen to it again, but I don’t know that it will change my opinion that much.