Creatures of the Sun Prepare Debut Album of Illuminating Psych-Rock

Garrett Ballard’s crooning drawl threads through rattlesnake coils of surf guitar, clacking freight-train drums and growling Harley Davidson bass: “You were obfuscated/ A thief in the night / You were obfuscated/ Now things don’t feel so right…”

Charlotte trio Creatures of the Sun (COTS) gets points for using “obfuscated,” from Latin obfuscat, meaning “darkened,” in the shadowy yet invigorating “Hell If I Know,” slated for an early June release. The irresistible tune conjures the surfin’ ghosts of Link Wray and garage rockers The Seeds, but transcends its forebears by spreading a message of community and connection in a genre too often defined by hallucinations and illusions.

The trio is set to perform at The Milestone on April 24 for the first day of the venerable venue’s Blood Sugar Fest Magic 4 festival.

“Hell If I Know,” like all COTS tunes, benefits from a delectable dualism. One one hand, sardonic lyrics are Ballard’s métier as the band’s founder, songwriter and vocalist. On the other, the upbeat music takes the edge off the tenebrous undertow of the lyrics.

“Everything I write, it has to come out where there’s a bit of an edge to it,” Ballard says. With its chorus of “How’d we end up here?/ The hell if I know…,” the song was inspired by Ballard’s move back home to Vail in the North Carolina foothills.

“There was this disconnect with how I thought things would be versus how they were,” Ballard recalls.

When Ballard tracked the tune at Mt. Airy’s Fallen Trees Recording Studio with his bandmates, bassist Benjamin Fortenberry and drummer James Mozina, the band’s surfy, reverberating groove transformed the song’s meaning.

“It turned more positive,” Ballard asserts. “It became this feeling of riding this wave through life. ‘I don’t know how we ended up here, but here we are … taking things as they come.’”

“Taking things as they come” could well be Ballard’s motto. He moved around a lot growing up and describes his childhood as tumultuous. Ballard discovered music young, picking up his mother’s nylon-string acoustic guitar one day and never putting it down.

“It became a way for me … to use my voice and express myself,” Ballard maintains. Writing songs at 14, he began playing in metal and hardcore groups in Jacksonville, Florida at age 17.

After moving to Charlotte, Ballard played bass in moody rock foursome The Carbonari. He cofounded psychedelic, country-rock quintet The Snakebirds, which released a self-titled EP of rollicking backwoods sci-fi vignettes in 2015.

“Me and those guys, we all lived together and were watching a lot of X-Files late at night,” Ballard recollects. “We’d try to spin some of these [episodes] into songs.”

By 2017, Ballard needed a change. He decamped with his then-girlfriend to Roanoke, Virginia, where he enrolled in remote classes at Orlando’s Full Sail University, studying audio engineering and production. At Full Sail, Ballard also pursued an interest in graphic design, a skill that recently resurfaced in the flyers, albums and merch he designs for Creatures of the Sun.

Ballard’s relationship fizzled and he moved back down to Jacksonville in 2018. There, he finished earning his bachelor’s degree from Full Sail and met Victoria Havekost. In the meantime, Ballard’s friend and former Snakebird Ben Fortenberry reached out. He was playing bass with Charlotte art/noise/dance band Family Video, which had just lost its guitarist. He asked if Ballard was interested in the gig.

“[Ballard] came up a couple random weekends all the way from Florida to play with us,” Fortenberry says.

Perhaps that was the nudge Ballard needed to come home. In 2023, he and Victoria married, moved back to Vail and subsequently bought a house. Ballard continued to play guitar in Family Video.

Read more: Family Video Goes Darkwave Dance on ‘Problem With My Heart’ (2024)

After releasing the melancholic, mystic and ultimately uplifting folk tune “A Thousand Little Deaths” under his own name, Ballard cast about for a new musical direction. He found it in a psychedelic tune about a man’s love affair with weed. Against a jaunty garage-rock beat and coiling pointillist guitar, Ballard affects a lazy nasal drawl: “Green queen/ your perfume drives me wild/ You don’t say much/ but baby you get loud…”

It’s the very first COTS song, and like all of the band’s early tunes, Ballard plays all the instruments.

“[The song] is talking about fading away into oblivion with weed,” Ballard explains. “I wrote it when I was stoned, obviously.”

Ballard still likes the song, though he no longer relates to it.

“I actually am a year and a half substance-free, but I used to smoke a lot of weed and I used to drink,” he offers.

“As an artist, I had this perception that I needed to smoke or drink and it would open me up creatively,” Barrett reasons. “But, since I stopped smoking [and] drinking, I’ve been able to write a lot more stuff and get a lot more in tune with how I am actually feeling.”

When “Green Queen” was written, Ballard was thinking of COTS as a studio-only project. As he continued to write, Ballard felt more and more drawn to the sounds of classic surf rock like Dick Dale and newer psych-rock like The Growlers.

“Something about it speaks to me, that kind of grit, the vibe of it,” Ballard says. “[Psychedelia] is about expanding awareness.”

Ballard maintains that psychedelic rock’s spatial effects, like reverb and delay, play with perceptions of time in creative ways.

“When I’m writing … and playing those upbeat, rock-based riffs, it makes me feel good.”

There’s no better illustration of Ballard’s assertion than “In Your Wave,” a bopping, ebullient slice of psych that Ballard says is about falling in love with his wife.

“It’s about how I felt the first time I was caught in her wave, her aura,” he says.

Determined to turn COTS into a full-time band, Ballard split amicably with Family Video in April 2025 and sent a demo of his tunes to Fortenberry, who joined COTS in January 2025. Drummer Gabriel Avon completed the lineup and COTS played its first show on Valentine’s Day 2025 at Petra’s.

After Avon left the band in August, Mozina replied to a post on the Charlotte Facebook musicians group looking for a drummer. The name Creatures of the Sun and Ballard’s deft, storytelling songwriting appealed to the drummer, who had primarily played punk rock up to that point.

The band members jammed in a NoDa storage facility, then COTS played its first gig with Mozina in Raleigh. Just months later, they’d be voted Best New Band by Queen City Nerve readers in our 2025 Best in the Nest issue.

“It’s been almost a year and it’s been great,” Mozina says.

The band recently signed to startup indie label Charlotte Court Records. Label owner Chad Barnard is also the owner and lead engineer for Fallen Tree Studios, the Mt. Airy facility where COTS is completing the 10 tracks that comprise the surfing psych-rock trio’s self-titled debut album, slated for an August release.

“I have this line that … encapsulates the band, and what I’m trying to do,” Ballard says. From one of COTS’s upcoming songs, “Kings of the Wasteland,” it’s a characteristically evocative lyric: “Slow dancing while the sun burns out…”

“It’s like we’re here right now, writing our names in the sand,” Ballard expounds. “We’re all slow dancing while the sun burns out. We’re not sure about the future [or] how we got to where we are. But we can choose how to show up, connect, spread some love and have some fun.”

“Garrett’s a great songwriter,” Fortenberry adds. “He’s able to find a message, convey it really well [and] put it together with music.”

With beguiling riffs and kaleidoscopic production, COTS makes surfy, psychedelic garage rock designed to empower people. Ballard is encouraging folks to catch the COTS wave, immerse themselves in the band’s musical duality, acknowledging the shadows and embracing the light — until the day the darkness dissolves.