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Jul 15, 2026 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Javier Fernandez

Houston-based guitarist Kelly Doyle has been a go-to sideman and session player in his local scene for years, moving between genres while sharing stages and studios with the likes of Phosphorescent, Craig Finn, Robert Ellis, What Made Milwaukee Famous, and Khruangbin. His upcoming album, Thieves, takes a similarly expansive approach to Doyle’s own music. After a long period making ambient music, Thieves represents Doyle’s return to instrumental guitar-focused compositions, now using his guitar as one moving part in a larger whole.

The resulting instrumentals draw on immersive pedal steel, ambient compositions, jazz and country. “I really don’t think of it as jazz at all,” Doyle says. “I know it’s a necessary descriptor that you have to use. But I think of it as just part of a trajectory of things I dig.”

The album was produced and mixed by Steve Christensen (Khruangbin, Steve Earle) and features Doyle on guitar, Will Story on bass, Jeremy Bruch on drums, and Nelson Deveraux on saxophone.

Doyle has already shared the album’s lead single, “Bats Are Cute,” and today he is sharing another new track, “Cold Open,” alongside an accompanying live video, premiering with Under the Radar.

“Cold Open” finds Doyle and his collaborators carefully crafting a dreamy and surreal mood piece. The focus shifts between Doyle’s guitar, Deveraux’s sax, and the entrancing dance of melodies between the two, all while Bruch’s drums ripple out in hypnotic elliptical rhythms. At moments, the results recall Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack, combining smoky lounge jazz sax runs with an otherworldly mood. It is a track that feels steeped in simmering nocturnal mystery and uncanny liminality, all shaped by Doyle and his bandmates’ playful, exploratory soloing.

Doyle says of the track, “‘Cold Open’ is kinda like if Wim Wenders made a spaghetti western in space. It feels like a lost soundtrack cue—moody, spacious, and careful. The record has a long ambient ending, and it’s like the characters float off into space and die.”

Check out the song and video below. Thieves is out on August 14th via Strolling Bones Records.