John Errol’s “Float” Turns a Night Swim into a Revenge Fantasy

John Errol’s music has long operated on an uneasy axis between pop accessibility and industrial unease. The Los Angeles musician, whose last album Inferno arrived in 2021, cites Britney Spears, David Bowie, and Nine Inch Nails as touchstones — a spectrum that helps explain the friction in his work. On his new track “Float,” that friction tightens into something closer to predation.

The song began, according to Errol, with a specific fear: “I was swimming in a lake in the middle of the night, trying to evade whatever was lurking below.” Rather than leave that image behind, he turned it on its head. “This song reworks those memories into a revenge fantasy where prey becomes predator, where violence and intimacy coalesce into something more menacing,” he said. “Kill or be killed, so they say.”

That movement — from fleeing to hunting — marks “Float” as more than a simple return. It suggests a darker, more assertive register for an artist who has spent time away. The title carries an almost ironic weight: floating becomes less about weightlessness and more about hovering before a strike.