Pink Skies
There is a redwood tree on a street in Oakland that grew so powerful it split the concrete sidewalk clean open. Arieh Berl — who makes music as Pink Skies — has been thinking about that tree for years. About what it means to grow through resistance rather than around it. About the strange beauty of things that refuse to be contained. It is, in retrospect, a fitting metaphor for his entire career. Berl came up in the Bay Area indie and punk scenes of the mid-2010s, playing in a band that didn't quite fit anywhere. 924 Gilman Street — the legendary all-ages punk venue in Berkeley that launched Green Day and Operation Ivy — banned them for being too indie. The indie clubs had no use for them either. Too punk, too weird, too much. So they did the only logical thing: they figured it out themselves. They broke into Guitar Center after hours to record. They slept in abandoned offices and set up a DIY recording set up while sleeping on the floor with all the weird animals living in the building. They packed a van, drove it across the country several times living on peanut butter and water, and turned their collective inability to fit in anywhere into a kind of superpower. They skated, they pranked each other, they smoked blunts listening to Mac Dre, and they played every room that would have them. When the band eventually dissolved after moving to LA — amicably, still family — Berl kept recording. A handful of demos posted quietly online became his first EP. All those hours in abandoned offices had paid off after all. What followed is one of the more genuinely strange and singular discographies in independent music. Pink Skies is not a genre. It is a place — psychedelic, cinematic, emotionally dense, constructed from synthesizers and strange recorded sounds and vintage analog textures — and every album is a different film shot there. SPECTRA, his 2020 debut full-length, was made in total isolation on a remote island in the San Juan Islands in the dead of winter. No band, no distractions, just Berl and a studio chasing something kaleidoscopic and maximal. The record arrived like a transmission intercepted from somewhere further away than it had any right to be. Then came Summer's For Lovers, a sunburned California reverie written about a girl who moved to Brooklyn, the whole concept hatched on mushrooms in Yosemite. Then a two-week trip to sub-Saharan Africa, deep in the bush, where Berl watched lightning ignite wildfires that scorched the land into nutrients for new growth. He came home and made The Tree That Broke The Cement — an electronic album that begins with a subway sample from leaving New York and ends somewhere near the cosmos, about love and loss and the stubborn insistence of living things to keep growing through whatever tries to stop them. American Mood Ring, his 2025 album, arrived after years of driving through the country on tour — through truck stops and small towns and stretches of highway where the divide you read about in the news simply doesn't exist between people. By the time he sat down to write it, he was feeling the weight of all of it. The grinding of the American Dream on everyone around him. The beauty of a weekend on a lake. The fury of a system designed to wear you out. He went deep into classic rock and country, pushed his songwriting harder than he ever had, and made the most personal record of his life. A protest record disguised as a pop album. A love letter to a country he loves and resents in equal measure. In between, Berl has been quietly building one of the more impressive production credits in independent music. He has worked with 6LACK, Khalid, Saint JHN, and Glass Animals, accumulating a platinum credit that he doesn't mention nearly enough. He has shared stages with Cannons, TV Girl, Goth Babe, Boy Pablo, Del Water Gap, Neil Frances, and Day Wave. He took Pink Skies on the Mood Ring Tour — 18 cities across the US and Canada — and experienced something that felt, by most accounts, genuinely spiritual. Working in the tradition of Tame Impala and Toro Y Moi but beholden to no one, Pink Skies remains its own distinctive universe. Berl is not a recluse in the Kevin Parker mold — he is warm and funny and present, the kind of person who will make you laugh before he makes you feel something. But the music comes from the same place of uncompromising personal vision, made entirely for himself, which is precisely why the people who find it feel like they've discovered something that was always meant for them. Each project stands on its own — a sonic movie for your ears. Close your eyes. Maybe you can see it too. The next world is already in progress.