The Gatekeepers Complete Their Avant‑Rock Saga with Diary of a Teenage Prophet
Alex Wroten’s rotating cast of underground legends turns high‑school rituals, doomsday visions, and digital overload into an art‑rock fever dream built for listeners who like their narratives messy and their genres porous.
On April 17, Think Like A Key Music will release Diary of a Teenage Prophet, the third and final installment in The Gatekeepers’ sprawling avant‑rock saga—a concept record that feels like a scrambled late‑night broadcast from a future that looks uncomfortably like now.
Conceived by composer Alex Wroten, The Gatekeepers have spent the last few years building a small but fervent cult around their satirical “avant‑rock for the proletariat.” The 2022 debut introduced an unlucky artist battling a parade of smug, indifferent tastemakers; 2024’s Nostalgia for the Great American Monoculture zoomed out to skewer our algorithmic, screen‑addled present. Diary of a Teenage Prophet zooms in again—this time into the mind of a girl who may (or may not) be foretelling the end of the world from her bedroom.
It’s a coming‑of‑age story written in jump‑cuts and channel flips: one moment you’re in a high‑school hallway (High School Overture, She’s Just a Regular Teen), the next you’re staring down extinction (The End of Man), drifting through limbo -- or is it merely the future? (Probably the Afterlife), or tuning into a televangelist nightmare (For the Brown Book Tells Me So, The Fundamentals). By the time the needle reaches Everyone I Know Is Dead, it feels less like a concept album and more like a fever dream you’re still trying to decode the next morning.
A Rotating Cast of Cult Heroes
As with previous Gatekeepers releases, Diary of a Teenage Prophet is less a “band” than a secret society. Wroten’s core vision is animated by a who’s‑who of cult vocalists, prog royalty, and underground lifers—players whose names on a tracklist are a recommendation all by themselves.
Across the album’s 19 tracks you’ll hear contributions from:
- Peter Daltrey (Kaleidoscope, Fairfield Parlour)
- Shawn Phillips
- Ron Geesin
- Henry Kaiser
- Morgan Ågren (Mats/Morgan Band)
- Hugh Banton (Van der Graaf Generator)
- Fernando Perdomo
- Mattias Olsson
- Robert Webb (England)
- Amy Denio
- Friendly Rich
- CHEER‑ACCIDENT
- Ward White
- Frank Pahl
…and many other fellow travelers (a total of 33 featured guests) from the outer rings of art rock, psych, and experimental music.
True to The Gatekeepers’ ethos, the record never settles into a fixed lineup. Voices, textures, and personalities weave in and out of the narrative: choirs suddenly appear and evaporate, guitars lurch from jagged art‑punk to widescreen psych, vintage keyboards bubble up from the mix like stray memories. The effect is communal and slightly unstable—as if the album is being rewritten in real time by the people inside it.
First single, “She’s Just a Regular Teen,” now streaming.
Too Many Signals at Once
Musically, Diary of a Teenage Prophet pushes deeper into the territory mapped out on the first two records: part power‑pop immediacy, part art‑rock ambition, part cracked radio play. There are knotty, Zappa‑esque turns, Canterbury‑leaning progressions, lo‑fi electronic detours, and big, fluorescent hooks that show up just when things are getting too strange.
It’s an album built for listeners who like their narratives messy and their genres porous—fans of Frank Zappa, XTC, The Flaming Lips, Gentle Giant, or even the more adventurous corners of modern art‑rock like Black Country, New Road will find plenty to unpack here. Humor and unease live side by side: punchlines land a half‑second before you realize the line they’re delivering is actually terrifying.
The teenage prophet at the center of it all never fully steps into focus. Instead, her world is reflected in fragments: school rituals (Friday Night Rites), warped self‑help mantras (Way Too Much Attention), authoritarian charisma (In Matt’s Image), and the creeping sense that even prophecy can be turned into content (The Messenger vs. The Message). It’s funny. It’s unsettling. And it sounds uncomfortably like the way the modern world actually feels—too many signals arriving at once.
Formats, Extras, and Physical Editions
Diary of a Teenage Prophet arrives on multiple formats designed for deep listening:
- CD – featuring the full 19‑track album plus two exclusive bonus remixes:The Ancient Vagrant [CWNN Remix] and Way Too Much Attention [Alternate Timeline Mix], housed in expanded packaging.
- Deluxe 2‑LP Vinyl – limited pressing with a fully illustrated gatefold and complete lyrics, inviting you to live inside the story from overture to final fade.
- Digital – available on all major platforms for those who prefer their dystopian coming‑of‑age tales at the tap of a screen.
In keeping with The Gatekeepers’ previous releases, the emphasis is on creating an album that rewards immersion: lyrics to pore over, recurring motifs to spot, Easter eggs buried in the arrangements. It’s the kind of record that invites obsessive listening rather than background streaming.
The Trilogy Closes—For Now
Diary of a Teenage Prophet closes the circle that began with The Gatekeepers’ original “avant‑rock opera about rejection.” Taken together, the trilogy traces a crooked line from individual frustration to societal absurdity and finally to something more intimate and eerie: a single teenager trying to make sense of a world that might actually be ending, or might just be collapsing into endless distraction.
Whether you come for the concept, the cast list, or the sheer musical ambition, this is the kind of album that reminds you the long‑form, narrative‑driven LP is still very much alive—and still one of the best ways to tell a story too strange for any other medium.
The Gatekeepers – Diary of a Teenage Prophet is out April 17, 2026 on Think Like A Key Music.
