Charles Moret is a 26-year-old artist from Los Angeles who’s been writing songs his entire life, but only recently decided to fully pursue his music career after shifting his focus from college basketball. He released his debut EP Dreammaker in 2024, and his debut album Spills is out now, released May 11 2026.
Spills is “a single passage moving across panels of California life, set under the California sun.” It captures the essence of California sonically while exploring themes of place, class disparity, self-recrimination, and love. The album was recorded under intense personal and financial pressure, and finishing it became a kind of healing for Charles.
We had the opportunity to ask Charles some questions about Spills, its meaning, and the process of creating its sonic world — read below.
HARMONIZE: You describe Spills as “a single passage moving across panels of California life.” What was the first image or feeling that sparked the record?
CHARLES: The title track “Spills” definitely set the tone of how I wanted to explore imagery when writing the album. I was trying to find a way to describe the eeriness of the city at night, the eeriness of the class disparity present and how it feels to be in it, seeing these monoliths in the night sky. My friend Gio lived in Downtown LA at the time, and I was doing a lot of sessions on the Eastside, so there were many nights of driving through that part of the city. There was also a period of extreme fog when I was writing everything and during that time, and it creates that dreamlike effect with the buildings where they’re jutting out into the sky beyond the mist, you can’t see the full thing. The tops of them almost sit like alien ships in the sky. That’s where I got the lyrical idea for that song, this alienation of inequity mirrored by the motherships hovering above us all.
HARMONIZE: How did the idea “Maybe we’re all deserving” shape the album’s themes?
CHARLES: It came from this idea that anyone, or I in this case, can impart so much “truthful” judgement on oneself that you eventually can wring all the life out of you. The judgement can be valid, but at a certain point you realize that we all carry varying levels of failing. You can spend as much time in that world, as fully built out as it is, as much as you want or as equally as you want with the moral goodness – equally built up – that lies in every soul as well. In spending so much time in this place of judgement, you realize there is an equal-sized space full of love and forgiveness. These two places sit next to each other at all times. We’re all deserving of great judgement, and we’re all deserving of great love. I tried to weave that idea into every song.
HARMONIZE: This album is rooted in California. What was your process for capturing that sense of place in the sound itself?
CHARLES: The album is a balance of cool and warm tones, night and day, love and judgement. [It features] live-recorded hats that added a mistiness to everything, an aliveness to everything – as alive as California is and wild as it is, full of the world. The rhythm sections had to mirror that; we took a lot from classical music in that sense, with Timpani washes, the thumps of the kicks, the drums being alive. Having Daniel Venz play the live stuff drove that home, since he can rip and is classically trained, so he brings out similar dynamics to a classical rhythm section – big pops and thumps. At the same time, there’s a jazzy coolness to it too, this is a city of Jazz Music and Hip Hop and Soul. Having those elements present was so important as well. He can do it all.
Aziz Yehia played live hats over all our programmed drums to add life to them, keeping that aliveness in everything. It was Alejandro Speranza’s idea to run everything recorded in the box that we did with Royce and Carson in Utah, back through live amps, so every piece of this became a real frequency, got to exist in the real world in a sense, again that wildness and aliveness was so important to capture. For instance, on “Wherever U Let Go“, that synth rhodes that plays throughout is dreamy and warm and washed just like the sun here, run through live amping because originally it was a modular synth we plugged directly into the computer. We then burned it out on this massive live amp that added all this dirtiness and strength to its sound.
California is musically the origin of so much warm, guitar-driven music that we wanted to pay homage to that with the warmth and drive of the guitars. I wanted there to be this California cowboy country element to everything. I think this was partially informed by the long drives across the state we were doing to record in Utah with Carson, where he was living at the time. The balance of the fast paced, jazz and hip hop and rock elements of the music with the laid-back country and Americana influence was important to get in there.
[There are also] religious aspects of the lyrics because of the theme that California has everything, and everything is god. The choir vocals and oohs were church-like; we even repeated this Latin phrase throughout (“in dubitatio est intellectus”) by way of a makeshift choir of Royce and Carson.
HARMONIZE: You recorded the album under intense personal and financial pressure. Looking back now, what did finishing Spills teach you about yourself?
CHARLES: That it’s such a privilege to be alive. To be able to make something with other people. All the bad may still be there but it’s sitting right next to all this beauty! I had to learn to parse them out, to see clearly, to become grateful. This may be a little hippie dippy-ish (I’m a Venice Beach guy cmon now), but my Dad always says all you have to do is say “thank you” to the universe and truly mean it and that is enough.
HARMONIZE: What does Spills represent for you personally as a moment in your life?
CHARLES: A time of great emotional and personal strife, but also of the proudest I’ve ever been of my music up until that point, the most supported and loved I felt by the people in my musical life (and sometimes in that celebration I created that aforementioned pressure for myself), the joy of creating something so personal and having everyone be onboard with that and being able to fully and finally express it without compromise.
I think of those two weeks in the studio with everyone, getting to explore without restraint. It was like when you do the Star Wars ride at Disneyland and get to be the one flying the ship around, maybe you have to elbow a kid out of the way to do it or something (that’s a joke, just clarifying!). I was just so pumped to be able to fully realize everything we wanted to do musically.
Saving up the money for that time, driving back and forth to Utah with Royce, these great desert roadtrips, getting emotional in the studio about the music, having these epiphanies in the creation process as a group, getting all these great musicians in and blocking out two weeks of work to do it, just having this place of pure creation to go to everyday, especially when you really don’t have access to that at any other point in time, was unbelievable. It was electric for real. It was the best musical experience of my life in that way. That’s partly why everything being live was important to making it, because myself and everyone else wanted to capture that uniqueness we were all experiencing and give it back to the listener.
It’s one of the most exciting periods of my life, in addition to leading into one of the lowest periods of my life: a bit of a breakdown due to overworking, emotional and/or friendship stress, and fatigue. All those pressures, self-imposed and external, were necessary to experience to learn about balance. Spills represents my hardest and best memories, and I love it so much and forever.
Listen to Spills HERE.