Color Theory release the single ‘Time to Kill’ with an instrumental
Color Theory, the synthpop project of Brian Hazard, released the single “Time to Kill” on 28 August 2026 on Bandcamp, with an instrumental version.
Los Angeles synthpop project Color Theory released the single “Time to Kill” on 28 August 2026. The digital release pairs the song with an instrumental version and is out through Brian Hazard’s own 11th Records imprint on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, SoundCloud and YouTube.
Hazard writes, sings, produces and mixes the project himself and has been releasing under the Color Theory name since the 1990s.
What ‘Time to Kill’ is about
The track sets a melodic electropop arrangement against a lyric about suppressed anger. It starts from ordinary irritation, the kind produced by a traffic queue or a comment thread, and follows the thought until it turns into revenge scenarios involving killer bees, wild boar and helicopter blades. Hazard sums up the distance the song travels in a single line on his own site: “Somewhere between forgive and forget, there’s a swarm of killer bees.”
That mix of bright synthesizer melody and dark subject matter runs through most of his catalogue, which he describes as melancholy synthpop. The instrumental version that fills out the release strips the vocal away and leaves the arrangement to carry the same material on its own.
Color Theory XP and the 2026 release run
“Time to Kill” arrives alongside Color Theory XP, a browser project Hazard put online at colortheorymusic.com that rebuilds the release as a Windows XP desktop, complete with a log-in screen offering separate entries for Hazard himself, a guest and a password-protected patron account. The invitation on his main site reads “Party like it’s 2004, with easter eggs galore”.
The single also lands in the middle of a dense release year. Hazard has issued the singles “And Which Way Is Up”, “Fall Back”, “The Naked Eye” and “Couldn’t It Be Me?” during 2026, along with the “Arm’s Length” and “Resist Me” EPs, all of them ahead of “Time to Kill”.
About Color Theory
Color Theory is the solo project of Brian Hazard, based in the Los Angeles area and running since the 1990s. Hazard handles writing, vocals, production and mixing himself, and releases the material through his own 11th Records.
The project reached a wider audience during the file-sharing years, when the track “Ponytail Girl” spread after listeners mistook it for an unreleased Depeche Mode B-side. Hazard later won the grand prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and his songs have been placed in the video games Just Dance and Rock Band and in MTV’s The Real World. His recordings have passed 15 million streams.
The Depeche Mode connection has stayed close to the surface of the project. Hazard issued the covers compilation “Color Theory Presents Depeche Mode” in 2003 and returned to the catalogue in 2022 with a double A-side of “Sometimes” and “The Things You Said”, which Side-Line covered at the time: Color Theory does double Depeche Mode feature on new single ‘Sometimes + The Things You Said’. Asked by Apple Music to name three favourite albums, Hazard listed David Sylvian’s “Secrets of the Beehive”, Depeche Mode’s “Some Great Reward” and The Cure‘s “Seventeen Seconds”, the last of which he has named as the starting point for his 2019 album “Lucky Ago”.
The album run since then covers “Mages” in 2021, “The Skeleton’s Closet” in 2022, “Underneath These Dying Stars” and its companion remix set in 2023, and “This Bright Circumstance” in October 2025. Hazard has kept up a fast singles schedule through 2026, with “And Which Way Is Up”, “Fall Back”, “The Naked Eye”, the “Arm’s Length” and “Resist Me” EPs and the single “Couldn’t It Be Me?” all appearing before “Time to Kill”. He also runs a monthly subscription through Patreon under which subscribers receive two new songs each month, and curates a weekly Spotify playlist of new synth-driven pop.
“Time to Kill” is the latest instalment in that release pattern. No follow-up album has been announced.
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