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May 25, 2026 By Caleb Campbell

Chicago-based musician Josh Chicoine is likely best known for his time fronting 2000s indie rock band, The M’s. Chicoine returned in 2024 with the Golden Line EP, debuting his new project, Cult Canyon, alongside a handful of friends and collaborators, including Alison Chesley (aka Helen Money), Susan Voelz, and Max Crawford (Poi Dog Pondering). Earlier this year, Cult Canyon shared their debut full-length album, Smoke Tricks, and now they’ve followed with an accompanying music video for one of the record’s highlights, “Run Red Lights.”

“Run Red Lights” is a shimmering blend of tones, beginning on a sunny indie rock guitar jangle and driving drum groove. Chicoine and the band temper this warmth with bleary layers of off-kilter vocal harmonies. As the song winds on, the effect becomes almost psychedelic, as if the track itself has been warped by blistering desert heat. Meanwhile, the track’s steady driving pulse eventually begins to turn frayed and frenetic, with the radio edit culminating in a jagged-edged guitar solo. In this climactic moment, the accompanying video similarly descends into a kaleidoscopic blur, overlaying Choicoine’s crazed wanderings with a color-drenched visual freakout.

Chicoine says of the track, “The original song on the record Smoke Tricks is seven minutes, twenty seconds, and I made the radio edit just to see what the song would be like. It’s really more for the music video, but maybe someone on the radio side might pick up a 4-minute version versus a 7-minute one; who knows anymore.

There’s a natural break in ‘Run Red Lights’ where me and my friends, singers Mel Brausch-Wilford and Lindsay Weinberg, tracked many, many ascending vocal lines to get to this very disconcerting rise up to the end of the first half of the song. From there, the song is a straight 3-minute groove or whatever, so folks will have to listen to the full version if there’s interest to see how it all ends up.”

Check out the song and video below, along with the extended full version of the track. Smoke Tricks is out everywhere now.