The name DONNIE X DARKO doesn’t come from a boardroom, a label committee, or any carefully engineered branding session—it grew out of two artists welding their lived worlds together until the line between them blurred into one shared voice. Sunny Darko, raised in Sacramento, and Deadbeat Donnie, forged in Akron, built that voice over years of swapping ideas, stories, and scars, creating a collaboration that feels less like a duo and more like a single pulse. Their newest release, DONNIE X DARKO II (Dark Shades & Ultraviolets), carries that pulse into a heavier, more cinematic place, as if the entire project were shot through old projector reels stained with shadow and ultraviolet burn.
Darko has always leaned toward the strange and the haunted—horror imagery, unsettling beauty, and the kind of honesty that doesn’t dodge blood, grief, or the jagged edges of healing. But this album, their second, moves with a different weight. It pulls from the darker corners of addiction, recovery, and mental health, but also from the fragile brightness that’s possible when survival turns into something stronger than luck. There’s versatility in every direction: grimy bar-heavy stretches built for late-night headphones, emotional records about love and loss, even moments where psychedelics and psilocybin become something like spiritual navigators instead of taboo topics. The album doesn’t stick to a mood—it evolves, shedding layers as it moves, starting with a storm and ending with something closer to a sunrise.
For Darko, that honesty isn’t decoration—it’s biography. Growing up surrounded by drug use, broken homes, and a carousel of substances that nearly swallowed him, he spent years fighting heroin, meth, cocaine, pharmaceuticals, and whatever else found its way into reach. Getting sober more than a decade ago didn’t close the book; it opened a responsibility. He writes with the urgency of someone who knows exactly how many people never made it to their second chance, and he carries them into the music—friends lost to the opioid crisis, stories that still bruise when spoken, wounds that keep reopening every time the epidemic claims someone else. One of the most personal tracks on the project is dedicated to his fiancée, tracing how they met and how the relationship became a steadying force in the chaos. Another dives deep into the healing potential of psilocybin, not as a trend but as a tool that once helped guide him back toward himself.
Donnie’s side of the collaboration brings its own surreal color palette—horror film tension, and production choices that feel like flickering neon reflecting off midnight pavement. Together they build landscapes that feel lived-in, half-lit, and brutally human. And even though the album stands firmly on their dual spine, they opened the door for exactly two outside voices: the homies Maulskull and Riggy Marz, the only features on the entire project, chosen because they match the wavelength rather than chase it.
What makes this release even more intriguing is that it’s not the end of the story. While this album is still rolling out its shadows and ultraviolets, the two are already deep in the next phase—constructing Side B of DONNIE X DARKO II, expanding the world they’ve built without repeating themselves. If Side A feels like wandering through dusk, Side B is shaping up to be the hour right after, where the dark becomes a different kind of language.
