Retro Music Exclusive: Spycraft, by Hounds
Spycraft is an electronic music album available only at Retro. It is the eighth album from Hounds.
The Introduction to this album, which serves as its liner notes, and the first track (below) are free. The remainder is for full Retro subscribers. However, you can access free for a full week all 250+ Retro articles, including this Hounds LP and all others, by clicking the button below.
Hounds Music Library Index
Tracks, album links, and liner notes for the nine Hounds albums released so far can be found at the links below. Each Hounds album is different from the next in tone and beats, so if you find that you don’t respond to one, you may well respond to another!
Albums
October 28, 2024
Gamer (forthcoming)
June 2, 2024
Spycraft (below)
September 10, 2023
Network (album)
August 6, 2023
Piracy (album)
July 31, 2023
Spacewalk (album)
July 23, 2023
Midnight (album)
July 16, 2023
Fliers (album)
July 14, 2023
Transpecific (album)
Compilations
March 1, 2025
Second Conversion (forthcoming)
July 25, 2023
Conversion (compilation)
Spycraft Liner Notes
Between 2018 and 2020, I authored three national bestsellers focusing on the political career of the 2024 Republican Party presidential nominee. All of these nonfiction works were curations of reliable major-media reporting from around the world and stretching back decades; they were works of biography, not political philosophy, and in writing and publishing them I became the Donald Trump presidential historian with the most bestselling works on this controversial man’s late-in-life political turn.
Whenever you write about a controversial figure—any celebrity, really, whether in the realm of politics of any other—you immediately draw fire from quarters loyal to that particular figure, and my books about former President Trump were no exception. As one of the books was about noncriminal international political collusion; and another about an overseas criminal conspiracy not directly involving Mr. Trump; and another about political corruption in Washington that did indeed involve Mr. Trump, and for which broad course of conduct he’s presently facing both civil and criminal cases in response to, it was easy for those who didn’t read the books themselves beyond their titles—Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019); and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020)—to presume that all three were the work of a political partisan seeking to spin wild conspiracy theories about a highly polarizing public figure rather than hard-earned, professional-grade work-product from a man who’s been an attorney, a journalist, a historian, and an author for decades.
I recall once, at a time two of the three books mentioned above were on bookshelves in stores across America, being asked to give a lecture on “conspiracy theories” at the University of Miami. I declined, stating—truthfully—that I have no interest in such nonsense, and so I wouldn’t have anything to say about it to undergraduate students. Beyond a brief span of months in my mid-childhood when, as a bonding exercise with my late father Robert Abramson, we watched every James Bond film then available for VHS rental, I don’t even have any interest in the sort of spycraft and intrigue that gives rise to conspiracy theories. I believe the Earth is round; that we did in fact land on the Moon; that John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman; that Sasquatch, The Abominable Snowman, ghosts, and the Chupacabra don’t exist; that aliens have never visited Earth (and thus dead extra-terrestrial bodies aren’t stored Area 51 or anywhere else); that the September 11 attacks weren’t an inside job, but just the work of foreign terrorists; that former president Barack Obama was born in the United States and is a Christian; and that Elvis Presley is, sadly, dead. In fact, I even disagree with leading political figures like Hillary Clinton or the late Harry Reid about whether the United States Air Force has ever encountered an unmanned spacecraft of extra-terrestrial origin (a view that places me at odds with many upstanding veterans and even some folks at the Pentagon). I have less interest in conspiracy theories than almost anyone.
But I did write three bestselling books concerning events that America’s very real and not-at-all-mythological intelligence community have understandably taken an abiding interest in, and I therefore have spent a lot of time researching the people, places, and events of the latter half of the last decade and the early part of this one that were the subject of federal investigations by both the U.S. House and Senate intel committees.
And I was, in 2022, contacted by the House January 6 Committee to assist it with its historic investigation of the January 6 insurrection. And I have been in touch with congressional investigators whose remit includes intelligence matters; these are not spies, however, merely civil servants investigating potentially criminal conduct of a transnational character. Have I been contacted by actual spies through third parties? Yes, but my interest in what they have to say is limited to what public evidence can corroborate, and thus in what a responsible lawyer, journalist, nonfiction author and presidential historian would report. While I may indeed believe that we live in a time when certain U.S. and world leaders are willing to act in ways that would shock the national conscience—or what is left of it—I suspect that a less naive and optimistic researcher (not that I have ever thought of myself as particularly naive or particularly optimistic) would note that history confirms leaders of all stripes have been engaging in astonishingly dispiriting conduct for centuries or even millennia—so the present is little different.
When I started thinking about what I wanted the eighth Hounds album to become, I was mindful, first and foremost, about the tonal and narrative adventures the other seven albums had sought to take: trips to outer space (Spacewalk), to the inside of a computer (Network), to the high seas (Piracy), to the world of video gaming (the still-unreleased Gamer), to locations that are often destinations for globe-trotting travellers (Fliers) and more. I was looking to explore something quite apart from anything I had yet considered or worked with tonally, and because I’m a huge film fan—if not a fan of spy films (I’ve missed the last several Bond films, and don’t expect to ever remedy that)—I thought that maybe something in the nature of a film score would be appropriate.
Then I thought, bemusedly, “What about a spy movie filled with conspiracy theories come to life?” These liner notes give you a pretty good sense of how I arrived there.
So what you will hear on Spycraft is a sort of deliberately over-the-top rendition of a spy film, perhaps partly in earnest homage to my father (who passed away this decade, and who really did strike a connection with me at a time I was struggling by renting and in some cases watching with me the entire Bond oeuvre) but certainly in significant part as a tongue-in-cheek, good-natured rejoinder to those who have wrongly imagined me as a man with an interest in spycraft, melodramatic intrigues, and conspiracy theories.
I am, in fact, like all of you, just a man who loves his country and who wants to see its aging democracy survive for centuries more. And ensuring this requires the exact sort of fidelity to rule of law and the exact sort of attention to detail in political journalism that I hope my curatorial journalism has helped advance. I would much rather that we be living in a different time, in which international news about illicit collusion and/or illegal conspiracies and/or contemptible corruption weren’t part of our daily news diet.
In the album below, each track is titled with a term of art in international espionage, with a sort of implicit narrative undergirding the track order that I have in my mind’s eye but won’t unfold here, as I certainly think listeners can and will author their own appropriate narratives. After all, this is, ultimately, the score to a movie that doesn’t exist. I so encourage you to hear in it sonic echoes of whatever images of spycraft you already have in your head just by way of being alive and alert in the postwar decades.
So even as I hear the killer of our protagonist whistling in “Wetwork”, you might not.
(Alternately, I suspect some of these songs—“Firefight”, “Exfiltrator”, “Turncoat”—could make for good workout music, as they aim to situate us in dramatic moments.)
You can find much more on the language of espionage—including definitions for any of the song titles below whose meaning you don’t immediately recognize—at this link.
With all that said, I very much hope you’ll enjoy Spycraft! I hope it has a sort of energy and vitality you respond to even if, like me, you have no particular interest in either the work of spies or the boundless imagination(s) of our nation’s conspiracy theorists.
{Note: A link to the subscriber-exclusive Spycraft playlist at YouTube can be found at the very bottom of this article.}