Ones To Watch: Cyclops Built His Own Lane Through Dubstep And Absurdity

From basement rock bands and college-dorm production to “Tear Jerker,” the Egg Carton, internet chaos, and his biggest headline tour yet, Keith Palmieri’s path to Cyclops has never followed a conventional blueprint.

Long before the eyeball became a logo, the Egg Carton became a community, and Cyclops started appearing across some of bass music’s biggest stages. Keith Palmieri was playing guitar with friends in basements around Boston.

The bands were hardly glamorous. Most never made it beyond school talent shows and battle-of-the-bands competitions, while their names ranged from Nyanza and Celebration Day to Pitching Tents and, for a brief period involving bandanas, Dolphin Gang. Palmieri remembers one battle of the bands in particular, when months of rehearsing Blink-182 and Jimmy Eat World covers were derailed after the drummer broke his arm a week before the show. He was eventually cleared to play, the band went through with it anyway, and the performance predictably unraveled onstage.

Those early bands never became a serious pursuit, but Palmieri’s attachment to heavy music stuck. By the time electronic music entered his life during his freshman year of college in late 2015, the foundation was already there.

Palmieri was living in an unusual dorm setup with five roommates, separated enough from the rest of the building that the six of them became especially close. One roommate, Neel, was heavily into electronic music and began showing him new records while also teaching him the basics of DJing. Their soundtrack at the time included Zomboy, Getter, Jack Ü, OWSLA, and the broader wave of brostep surrounding them.It did not take long before listening turned into trying to make the music himself. Palmieri opened Logic Pro 9, connected an original Scarlett 2i2, and started attempting to recreate the sounds he was becoming obsessed with. He readily admits the results were rough, but that hardly mattered.

“The music was all pretty bad but it was soooo fun,” he recalls.

That escape became especially important because Palmieri says he strongly disliked his first two years of college. Producing gave him somewhere else to put his attention and, gradually, something more meaningful to chase.

For several years, there was little evidence that chase would become a career. Palmieri uploaded early music to SoundCloud only to see tracks collect around 20 plays, made YouTube tutorials in an attempt to get his name circulating, and sent demos to labels that largely went unanswered.

By 2018, the lack of progress was becoming difficult to ignore. Other producers Palmieri knew online were beginning to receive support from touring DJs and artists they all admired, while his own music still seemed unable to break through the same wall.

Then one submission finally connected.

Palmieri sent music to Chime’s label, Rushdown, and the team wanted to release it. Chime became one of the first established touring artists to support his work, and the professional dubstep world suddenly felt a little less distant.

“The actual ‘dubstep industry’ didn’t feel like this unreachable thing,” Palmieri remembers.

The momentum did not explode overnight, but it kept building. The following year brought songs played at Lost Lands, his first manager, releases through Disciple, and an official remix for Herobust. As Palmieri puts it, things simply became “a little more real every year afterwards.”

Part of that progress came from finally narrowing down what Cyclops was supposed to be.

In 2019, “Deadweight” began earning some attention from other producers and helped lead Palmieri toward his first management relationship. At the time, his output still jumped between melodic material and much heavier ideas. His manager suggested that, given Palmieri’s longstanding love for metal and aggressive music, it might make sense to focus more deliberately on the heavier side for a while.

That decision proved important. Rather than trying to demonstrate every possible direction at once, Palmieri found that narrowing his focus helped him improve faster and gave the project a clearer identity.

Even the name Cyclops had started with that search for scale. Palmieri wanted to make music that felt “big” and “monstrous,” and the mythological creature seemed to fit. The eye-centered visual identity, however, took longer to form.

Despite the name, Palmieri was never especially drawn to depictions of a literal one-eyed human. He found the vertical pupils of snakes and other predatory animals far more interesting. At first, that meant simply asking record labels to incorporate an eyeball into release artwork. Over time, the motif spread across Cyclops’ logo, merchandise, live visuals, tour concepts, and increasingly elaborate creative world. 

The darker visual identity might have suggested an equally serious personality behind it. Instead, COVID introduced the project to something entirely different.

With touring halted, Palmieri began posting memes and ridiculous videos online. Fans responded, but the success initially created a strange contradiction. How was an artist making dark, aggressive dubstep supposed to reconcile that music with an online personality built around jokes and absurdity?

Eventually, Palmieri and his team stopped trying to reconcile it at all.

They landed on a much simpler explanation: Cyclops is absurd.

“The project can both be serious with the artistic side of things or the song subject matter, but the personality can still be lighter and fun,” Palmieri says.

That idea became increasingly central as the project evolved. The music itself no longer needs to remain as relentlessly dark as some of his earlier output, while the ridiculousness surrounding Cyclops has only become more elaborate.

Palmieri’s favorite jokes are rarely the ones that require a single post. They are the ones that demand unreasonable commitment.

When he joked about running for mayor of Colorado, the idea eventually grew into “Cyclops 4 Colorado” lawn signs, a mock mayoral plan of action, and a fake news program. Another bit revolved around saving hotel keycards so he would supposedly never need to pay for a hotel room again. To make that visual work, Palmieri spent roughly eight months collecting enough cards from tour stops to fill multiple pages of a binder.

Some ideas still go too far.

Before his Wooli collaboration became “Floot Loops,” Palmieri says the proposed title was “Skin Flute.” Both teams ultimately decided against it.

What started as an online personality eventually began bleeding directly into the music.

That relationship is especially clear on “DIS FUNCTION,” Cyclops’ second collaboration with ATLiens. Palmieri started the track after coming across a TikTok built around the line “Call me erectile, the way I’m at dis function,” immediately hearing it as a potential pre-drop vocal.

“There are two things ATLiens and I both really like: memes and weird dubstep,” he explained around the release.

The song came together quickly, then grew through live play and social media before officially dropping in September 2026. The result captures a version of CYCLOPS where the joke and the production no longer need to be treated as separate pieces of the project.

But before songs like “DIS FUNCTION,” there was one record that more clearly than almost anything else marked a change in Palmieri’s career.

When he first posted “Tear Jerker” online, the response arrived almost immediately. The video started gaining traction, and DJs began contacting him directly asking for the track. Then Subtronics reached out to tell Palmieri he thought the song was a hit.

A few weeks later, Palmieri arrived at Lost Lands and heard “Tear Jerker” receiving repeated support around the festival. He was already working on an EP for Disciple at the time, but the reaction convinced the label to get firmly behind the track as a single.

The shift was difficult to miss. The same producer who had spent years sending demos into silence was now fielding messages from established DJs asking him for unreleased music.

As Cyclops continued growing, those relationships increasingly turned into collaborations with artists Palmieri had once experienced purely as a fan. Few felt more full circle than working with NGHTMRE.

Palmieri had been listening to NGHTMRE back in 2015, around the same time he was first discovering dubstep and attempting to produce it in his college dorm. Years later, the two would collaborate on “Computah.”

“Collabing with NGHTMRE was definitely a full circle moment,” Palmieri says, describing him as both an exceptional producer and one of the nicest artists he has worked with.

That collaboration arrived amid a wider run that has also connected Cyclops with REZZ, Wooli, Flux Pavilion, BARELY ALIVE, ATLiens, TYNAN, and others. His 2026 alone included “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DUBSTEP” with BARELY ALIVE, “Jazz Cabbage” with Wooli, “Computah” with NGHTMRE, “Final Bonk” with TYNAN, and “DIS FUNCTION” with ATLiens, alongside a major appearance at Lost Lands’ Crater Stage.

Yet the next evolution of Cyclops is increasingly less about who Palmieri can collaborate with and more about what happens between him and the people who have followed the project there.

The Cyclops fanbase has become known as the Egg Carton, and Palmieri has made direct interaction with that community a recurring part of the project. He stays after shows to meet fans when possible and organizes festival meetups, an approach that has now started influencing the actual design of his live show.

That philosophy sits at the center of The Eye Witness Tour, Cyclops’ biggest headline run to date. Beginning January 15, 2027, the 28-date North American tour will pair a 360-degree performance setup with lasers, new visuals, merchandise, and a series of fan activations, with additional Phase 2 dates and a final show still to be revealed.

One of those activations, The Pupil People, will place 12 selected fans inside the DJ booth at each tour stop, surrounding Palmieri while he performs from the center of the 360° setup.

For an artist whose career began with trying to convince almost anyone to hear his music, there is something fitting about building the next stage around bringing listeners even closer.

“A BIG component of Cyclops is all the fans in the Egg Carton,” Palmieri says. “The 360 experience is about being right in the action with them.”

He already considers it his favorite tour yet.

Eventually, that run will bring Cyclops back to Boston for another milestone: Palmieri’s first hometown headline at Royale.

The venue carries history of its own. Before he was appearing on its marquee, Palmieri remembers attending shows there while he was still in college. Rather than rush into a hometown headline earlier in his career, he says he deliberately waited until Cyclops could return with the full production and lineup he wanted.

“Getting to finally put this on at Royale is so exciting and feels like a full circle moment from when I was going to see shows there in college,” he says.

Palmieri also sees the date as an opportunity to represent a region he feels has produced relatively few prominent dubstep artists.

“I feel very proud to represent my city and to also finally put on a sick show for us.” 

The hometown return neatly captures how much has changed without requiring Cyclops to abandon what made the project interesting in the first place.

The kid playing Blink-182 covers in school bands eventually found dubstep in an isolated college dorm. Twenty-stream SoundCloud uploads led to the first support from Rushdown and Chime. A fascination with heavy music became an increasingly recognizable sound, while a simple eyeball grew into an entire visual identity. Memes became part of the creative language. “Tear Jerker” changed the project’s trajectory. The audience around it became the Egg Carton.

Now, as Palmieri prepares to take his biggest headline production yet across North America and eventually return to the same Boston venue he once entered as a fan, the project still makes the most sense through the explanation he arrived at years ago: Cyclops is absurd.

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