TORONTO, ON. There is a particular kind of song that a band carries with them for years, one that survives set-list cuts and line-up changes and the ordinary pressures of making music, and keeps insisting on being heard. For Phantasia, the Toronto indie rock trio of Ethan Flynn (vocals/guitar), Mario Prifti (bass), and Michael Colangelo (drums), that song is “King Of All My Dreams.” Written by Flynn nearly nine years ago, it is the debut single from their brand-new album ‘I’ve Been Here Before,’ out now on all major platforms, and the opening statement of a band that has spent the better part of two years earning every note.
The song carries the weight of its subject with a kind of clear-eyed grace. It is about waiting for someone who may never come back. “There’s a kind of stubborn hope in it,” Flynn says, “even though it might not be healthy.” That tension lives in the lyric itself: “I just don’t know what to do / when my dreams, they all come true / but I’m nothing without you.” The arrangement makes space for that recognition through verses built on an unsettled 7/8 time signature that opens, at the chorus, into an emotionally direct 4/4. The music and the lyric resolve together into something both honest and hard to shake.
To understand what makes the recording sound the way it does, you have to understand how Phantasia prepared for it. Before a single note was committed to tape, the band spent a full year performing, auditioning over 40 songs in front of live audiences, rewriting and retitling tracks through dozens of shows around Toronto and the GTA, letting the chemistry between three musicians develop in the one place it actually counts: on a stage, in real time, in front of people. By the time they walked into RHC Music with engineer Jon Savard, they were not a band trying to find their sound. They already had it.
That preparation made possible the way the album was recorded: instrumentally, live off the floor, across just two days, with no click tracks, no metronome, and no locked tempo. Three musicians in a room, listening to each other and reacting, the interplay between Flynn, Prifti, and Colangelo captured exactly as it sounds when the band is firing. “It lets the song breathe in a more human way,” Flynn explains. The result is a recording that carries the energy of a live performance without sacrificing clarity. Guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, nothing more, mixed and mastered by Taraz Yazdani with the same commitment to directness that shaped every other decision the band made.
Phantasia came together in March 2024 when Prifti reached out to Flynn with the idea of turning his solo work into something collaborative. Colangelo came on board, and the three of them simply never stopped, writing, performing, refining, and eventually funding the album entirely themselves, with no label and no outside budget. “After lord knows how many gigs, rehearsals, and a chunk of studio time, I’m proud of what we’ve done,” Prifti says. “This is the first ever album that I was part of writing, conceptualising, and releasing. First of many more, I should hope, but it may always be the most memorable.” ‘I’ve Been Here Before’ is the sound of a band that has done the work. “King Of All My Dreams” is where it begins.
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