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Dec 15, 2025 By Caleb Campbell

Ira Dot is the new musical project from musicians, filmmakers, and artists Eddy Wang and Ryan Akler-Bishop, and early next year, the pair are set to share their debut album, In Blue Time, due out on February 27th via Second Spring. Together, Wang and Akler-Bishop pull from a deep well of influences, touching on shades of folk, slacker rock, chamber pop, electro pop, and psychedelia. They reference influences from the literary world (Anne Anlin Cheng’s writing on racial melancholia and Virginia Woolf), and incorporate them alongside eclectic sources of inspiration like animal calls and Animal Crossing, placing themselves at odds with easy lines of convention and genre. Similarly, In Blue Time’s creative process was fractured and piecemeal. The album came together in dorm closets, cabins, and studios across North America, with each track united by resonant thematic meditations on the color blue.

Today, the pair are sharing the record’s lead single, “Jane’s Party,” premiering with Under the Radar.

Akler-Bishop says, “Recorded over the span of five years, our debut LP In Blue Time strives to untangle the colour blue and its infinite connotations and iconography: heartbreak, capillaries, ocean, sky, etc. In 2022, Eddy wrote an early demo of our first single, ‘Jane’s Party.’ We recorded the final version in a cabin near Whistler in the heart of winter. It was an immersive process; we recorded together morning into night (the opposite of our earliest songs, which were assembled over a long period of time, sending tracks back-and-forth).”

“Jane’s Party” is shaded in the same intimate and confessional qualities that colored its recording. Where other moments on the record lean into psychedelic, ambient, or bracing electronic textures, the single unfurls gently with a graceful chamber pop arrangement and melancholic lyrics tinged by themes of loneliness and alienation. Wang’s vocal melodies drift atop swirling chamber pop instrumentation, leaving the cracked and imperfect qualities of his voice on full display while unearthing a pretty and plaintive quality within the blemishes. The melodies repeat in elliptical patterns, eventually taking on a hypnotic weight as swelling strings, lap steel, and sighing vocal harmonies cascade down in a beautiful and achingly sad tonal collage.

Akler-Bishop describes the track as “...an intimate chamber piece, where a Bach-interpolated piano melody meets lush harmonies, string sections, and lap steel. The core of the song is Eddy’s voice, singing about a love soaked in guilt, where benign liberty takes on the weight of a grave indiscretion.”

Check out the song and accompanying video below made by Darcy Demerse and stream the track here. In Blue Time is due out on February 27th via Second Spring.