The multi-disciplinary artist Oliver Ray—writer, poet, and singer-songwriter—has an edifying Substack page called Rimbaud’s Lost Papers, where his posts range from Achilles to the American abstract painter Mark Rothko to French theorist René Girard, showcasing his kaleidoscopic and esoteric mind.
From 1995 to 2005, Ray was a member of Patti Smith’s band, during which he co-wrote songs with the punk poet. In her recent memoir, Bread of Angels (2025), Smith writes, “… I met the young poet Oliver Ray, a positive source of raw Rimbaudian energy.”
In 2019, Ray released Out Passed Nowhere, an album replete with the sweeping loneliness and somnolent malaise of Gene Clark—if Clark, for some strange reason, found himself in Guatemala, singing about the trickster archetype (cue, “Ol’ Coyote”).
Now, Ray has released a new single, “Black Budget”, an ominous political commentary on the current times, where fortresses are hidden beneath the earth in a phantasmagorical topsy-turvy world, where a disembodied head is by the riverside, highlighting moral and spiritual corruption, as well as environmental damage.
Like the Doors-meets-R.E.M., “Black Budget” is bleak, surreal, and malefic, complete with an infectious chorus and ending with a searing electric guitar solo. Whereas Lou Reed wrote “I’ll Be Your Mirror” for Nico, Ray has seemingly written “Black Budget” to show how nature is a mirror to humankind’s self-destruction—don’t close your eyes, the evidence won’t go away.