Toronto Indie Rockers PHANTASIA Release “King of All My Dreams” From Brand-New Album, I’ve Been Here Before
There is a particular kind of song that a band carries with them for years, one that survives set-list cuts and line-up changes and the ordinary pressures of making music, and keeps insisting on being heard. For Phantasia, the Toronto indie rock trio of Ethan Flynn (vocals/guitar), Mario Prifti (bass), and Michael Colangelo (drums), that song is “King Of All My Dreams.” Written by Flynn nearly nine years ago, it is the debut single from their brand-new album I’ve Been Here Before, out now on all major platforms, and the opening statement of a band that has spent the better part of two years earning every note.
The song carries the weight of its subject with a kind of clear-eyed grace. It is about waiting for someone who may never come back.
“There’s a kind of stubborn hope in it,” Flynn says, “even though it might not be healthy.”
That tension lives in the lyric itself: “I just don’t know what to do / when my dreams, they all come true / but I’m nothing without you.” The arrangement makes space for that recognition through verses built on an unsettled 7/8 time signature that opens, at the chorus, into an emotionally direct 4/4. The music and the lyric resolve together into something both honest and hard to shake.
To understand what makes the recording sound the way it does, you have to understand how Phantasia prepared for it. Before a single note was committed to tape, the band spent a full year performing, auditioning over 40 songs in front of live audiences, rewriting and retitling tracks through dozens of shows around Toronto and the GTA, letting the chemistry between three musicians develop in the one place it actually counts: on a stage, in real time, in front of people. By the time they walked into RHC Music with engineer Jon Savard, they were not a band trying to find their sound. They already had it.
That preparation made possible the way the album was recorded: instrumentally, live off the floor, across just two days, with no click tracks, no metronome, and no locked tempo. Three musicians in a room, listening to each other and reacting, the interplay between Flynn, Prifti, and Colangelo captured exactly as it sounds when the band is firing.
“It lets the song breathe in a more human way,” Flynn explains.
The result is a recording that carries the energy of a live performance without sacrificing clarity. Guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, nothing more, mixed and mastered by Taraz Yazdani with the same commitment to directness that shaped every other decision the band made.
Phantasia came together in March 2024 when Prifti reached out to Flynn with the idea of turning his solo work into something collaborative. Colangelo came on board, and the three of them simply never stopped, writing, performing, refining, and eventually funding the album entirely themselves, with no label and no outside budget.
“After lord knows how many gigs, rehearsals, and a chunk of studio time, I’m proud of what we’ve done,” Prifti says. “This is the first ever album that I was part of writing, conceptualising, and releasing. First of many more, I should hope, but it may always be the most memorable.”
‘I’ve Been Here Before’ is the sound of a band that has done the work. “King Of All My Dreams” is where it begins.
First off, care to introduce yourself to our readers?
Hey! It’s Ethan Flynn here on behalf of Phantasia, it’s a pleasure to be talking to you! We are an indie rock band from Toronto and we just released our full-length debut album “I’ve Been Here Before”. Our band consists of Mario Prifti on bass, Michael Colangelo on drums, and myself on vocals & guitar! Our music blends jazz sensibility, melodic hooks, and progressive rock influences, and I like to think our music sounds nostalgic, even though it’s brand new. That’s kind of where the idea for “I’ve Been Here Before” comes from.
“King Of All My Dreams” stayed with you for nine years. What was it about this song that refused to let go?
Well, to answer that question, you have to understand where my songwriting journey has taken me. I wrote “King of All My Dreams” in December of 2016, and it might have been the first good song I ever wrote! Haha, you have to remember I was like 13 or 14 and in grade nine, so having a song that I was, and still am, proud of was a huge achievement. At that point, I was still figuring out my style, experimenting with lyrics, and finding my way with melodies and chords.
Looking back, that song really stands out because it was the first time everything seemed to come together in a way that felt genuine. It gave me a sense of confidence and made me realize that I could actually create something that I thought was really good. Around that same time, I must have written a dozen other songs, most of which were honestly pretty bad, but they were all part of the process. I held on to this song until I had a proper band to record it with, honestly because the 7/8 time signature in midi drums sounded terrible back then and I wanted to have it done the right way.
The shift from 7/8 to 4/4 is striking. How did that rhythmic change become part of the storytelling rather than just a musical choice?
Now that you mention it, the verses are full of uncertainty and doubt, while the chorus shifts into something much more direct and passionate. That contrast naturally lined up with the move from 7/8 into 4/4. The uneven feel of 7/8 in the verses creates this sense of instability, which reflects lines about not seeing beyond yourself, losing someone, and not knowing what to do. Then when the chorus hits, the rhythm settles into 4/4 and everything feels more grounded, almost like the narrator is clinging to something solid.
But the thing is, the stubborn hope in the chorus is not entirely comforting. Even though it sounds more resolved musically, the lyrics are still about waiting and holding on to someone who is no longer there. So that shift is not a full resolution so much as it is a kind of emotional insistence. The structure lets the listener feel that tension, where the music suggests certainty, but the words reveal that it is really just a refusal to let go.
You spent a full year testing songs live before recording. What did audiences teach you that you could not have learned in a rehearsal space?
Playing the songs live for a year changed them in ways we never could have predicted in a rehearsal space. In a room by ourselves, everything makes sense on paper, but you do not really know how a section feels until you see how people react to it in real time.
More importantly, I also get to see how the other band members react to the songs on stage. If someone is not really connecting with a certain section, or even with a song as a whole, it becomes obvious pretty quickly. That kind of honest, in-the-moment feedback pushes us to rethink parts, tighten arrangements, or sometimes even change the format of the song.
It allows us to improve upon what we originally wrote and see what actually feels right when we are playing it together. That dynamic has been huge for us, because it means the songs evolve into something more natural and cohesive, shaped just as much by our instincts as performers as by the original ideas.
There is a real sense of trust in how you play together. When did you first feel like you had truly become a band rather than collaborators?
Well, first and foremost, in a band you should all be collaborators. That is really the foundation of everything. In fact, that is the whole reason Mario and I started the band, because originally, we were just playing shows under the name Ethan Flynn after I had released a solo album where I was not really collaborating with anyone in a band setting.
After a while, it became clear to both of us that we wanted something more collaborative and to record a real LP with a full band. But I think the moment it started to feel like a true band was when the three of us got together, decided to call ourselves Phantasia, and started working towards this album. Everyone had a voice in the arrangements, the direction of the songs, and how we presented ourselves.
That sense of trust really grew through time, especially from playing live and working through songs together. We reached a point where we could rely on each other instinctively, both musically and creatively, and that is when it stopped feeling like a group of individuals collaborating and started to feel like a band with its own identity.