Indie dream pop artist CASTLEBEAT (Josh Hwang) has announced CASTLEBEAT II, set for 26 June 2026 via Spirit Goth Records, following the earlier single This Takes Time. The second track from the album, My Love, is out on 10 April on streaming.
The single
My Love is CASTLEBEAT at his most hypnotic: minimal, synth-laced dream pop with an almost 1980s edge, bittersweet and melancholy. The track reads like fragments from a diary and a photograph you can't stop revisiting, building quietly until the chorus lands with an understated kind of weight. Hwang also describes that lift as a "quiet crash," around the line: "I hit the floor and it's breaking my heart."
The album and the label
CASTLEBEAT II is a decade-spanning love letter to the 2016 self-titled debut. The release combines archived ideas, sounds and textures from that era, reimagined and reworked, with new songs that aim to capture the same spirit. Hwang says: "This album is a 10-year anniversary ode to my 2016 debut. Some of the songs started as ideas from that era that I never finished at the time. Other songs were written more recently, but I intentionally limited myself to the kinds of sounds and choices I would've made back then - just with a more dialed-in approach I've developed over the years."
The record's visual and structure deliberately mirror the debut, using the original CASTLEBEAT font and a similar sequencing arc. "This record is about taking a moment to recount a chapter before moving forward," Hwang says. What began as Hwang releasing his music for fun through his self-founded label Spirit Goth Records has grown over the past decade; the label is now run by Hwang and his wife Sonia, who often release music together as a duo, with CASTLEBEAT and the DIY ethos that started it all still at the centre.
Hwang writes, records and produces everything himself in a lo-fi aesthetic, but for the first time he entrusted final mixing and mastering to Brian Fisher. "The hardest part was trusting that handoff and not endlessly tweaking," he says, "but once I let that happen it actually made the album stronger." On his upbringing, he has said: "I was raised in a biracial family (my dad is Korean and my mom is from Spain) and had a pretty wide range of sounds around me early on. And in Southern California, you're in the car constantly - so radio and driving music becomes part of your daily rhythm. I think that sense of motion and melody naturally made its way into what I write." Now 32, he has cultivated CASTLEBEAT as a lo-fi indie project with jangly, guitar-based dream pop, gripping hooks and cassette aesthetics, with dreamy, melancholic overtones and a sense of false nostalgia, in a lane that has drawn comparisons to Craft Spells, Beach Fossils and Daywave, and that has amassed more than 300,000 monthly listeners and millions of streams.
My Love is out 10 April. CASTLEBEAT II is out 26 June 2026 via Spirit Goth Records.
