Sunken Man Debut Album Out via Single Lock

Sunken Man, the project of Mikey Rawls, will release its self-titled debut album via Single Lock Records on Sept. 25, 2026. The nine-track record was produced by Matthew E. White and features Alan Parker performing every instrument on the album.

Rawls grew up straddling two worlds. He was raised in Suffolk, Virginia — a small peanut-farming town where his father practiced law and everybody knew everybody — but went to school in Norfolk, the nearest thing to a city that part of the state had to offer. That gap between the two places, between the stillness of a small town and the noise of somewhere larger, became the first tension he learned to live inside. It would not be the last.

His father was insistent on certain things. The Beatles went on after dinner. Led Zeppelin came through the car speakers on long drives. The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan — these weren't just records, they were a kind of education, a father's way of saying: here is what music can do when it means something. Rawls absorbed all of it. And then, on his own time, he found two records that changed the shape of what he thought music could be: Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West, jagged and restless and completely alive; and Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which showed him that American music could be literary and fractured and still devastatingly human. He never fully recovered from either of them.

He carried all of it forward, into a life that grew full in the way lives do. A family. A career. The ordinary accumulation of responsibility that crowds out the margins where creative things tend to live. The songs were still there — they kept showing up — but the time to make them properly wasn't.

Then came the dissolution of a marriage, and with it a particular kind of silence. He found himself alone in the evenings in a house where a child was sleeping, and in that stillness — the specific quiet of a life being rebuilt from its foundations — he started writing again. Not as a hobby – as a necessity. Songs of heartbreak and longing and loneliness. Songs about the strange grief of losing one life and the stranger hope of building another. Songs about what it means to love someone new when you are still carrying the weight of what came before. He wrote them in the margins of everything else: late nights, early mornings, the small hours between one responsibility and the next.

'You don't have to give up your art to grow up. Music can live right alongside career, family, and responsibility — and sometimes it flourishes best there.'

When the songs were ready, he took them to Matthew E. White at Spacebomb Studio in Richmond — considered hallowed ground in American roots music these days, and the home of some of the most carefully made records of the last decade. White, who has produced critically acclaimed work for Natalie Prass, Foxygen, and others through Spacebomb, heard what Rawls had written and agreed to produce the album. The result is a nine-track debut that stands as one of the most honest records to come out of Richmond in years.

To record it, White brought in Alan Parker — a Richmond-born, Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist whose session credits include Bon Iver, Lucy Dacus, Dijon, and Flock of Dimes. In a first for both producer and musician, Parker played every instrument on the album: guitar, bass, drums, keys, everything. The cohesion that results is rare on any debut, let alone one made alongside a full professional life. The record sounds like it was built by a single musical intelligence — warm, precise, and deeply felt.

The songs sit somewhere between the emotional directness of Springsteen and the melodic intelligence of Wilco — the two poles of a musical education that stretches from a father's record collection to late nights alone with headphones. Tracks like 'Virginia Fog,' 'Hearts,' 'Holy Smokes,' and lead single 'Say A Prayer' create a portrait of real adult life: the grief and the joy of it, the longing and the renewal, the small moments of mischief and tenderness that survive even the hardest seasons. This is an album of heartbreak, yes — but also of hope, and of the particular joy that can only be found on the other side of loss.

He still has his day job. He still lives in Richmond. This record didn't replace any of that. It grew alongside it, in the margins, the way the best things do.

Album Credits

PRODUCED BY Matthew E. White

RECORDED AT Spacebomb Studio, Richmond, Virginia

ALL INSTRUMENTATION Alan Parker

Record Release Show

09/25 Richmond, VA – Get Tight Lounge

The album can be pre-ordered here.

Tracklist

Say A Little Prayer For Me 03:13

Hearts 03:11

Lay All Your Love On Me 04:15

Fall For It Again 02:51

VA Fog 02:57

Carolina Border Town 04:15

Fat Condo Kings 04:03

Love Like This 03:36

Holy Smokes 03:31

Photo Credit: Cameron Lewis