Our International Steampunk Day listening party comes to its final stop. We boarded the airship with Abney Park. We wound up the automatons of Steam Powered Giraffe. Now we climb into the time machine.
The Cog is Dead is the work of Florida musician John Mondelli, who has performed as Captain John Sprocket since founding the project in 2006. The name came from a random page of the Tom Stoppard play The Real Thing, words plucked from the page and made into a mission. At the time, by the band’s own early lore, Abney Park was one of the only other steampunk bands Mondelli knew existed.
Think about that. This genre’s musical wing was once so small that its members could nearly be counted on one hand, and somehow two of those names have ended up in our pages this same week.
Every great steampunk band needs a story, and this one is about grief.
In the band’s mythology, John Sprocket is a clockmaker in Grimsby, England in 1893, a man devoted to gears and springs and the quiet beauty of analog machinery. Then he learns of a terrible invention on the horizon: the digital clock. No gears. No springs. Just electricity and a charmless number display.
The death of the cog.
Devastated, Sprocket is rescued from despair by Renate Goodwin, the finest mechanic in town, who makes a sensible Victorian suggestion: build a time machine, travel to the future, and see what this digital business does to the world.
So the trio, Sprocket on vocals and guitar, Goodwin on drums, and Bradley Harrington III on bass, now tumbles through time aboard their flying time ship, playing steam-powered songs and avenging the death of the cog wherever they land.
It is ridiculous. It is also sneakily profound. Underneath the theatrical absurdity and the robot buffalo, this is a band whose entire premise is mourning beautiful obsolete things and refusing to let them go quietly.
If that does not sound like every goth you have ever loved, I do not know what does.
Here is where The Cog is Dead earns the “musical identity crisis” label they have cheerfully claimed for themselves. Because the band travels through time, the music gets to as well. Dark cabaret, ragtime, rock and roll, folk, punk, reggae detours, film-score drama, Russian folk flourishes. Whatever era the time ship lands in, the song takes its costume.
Start with “The Death of the Cog” itself, the origin story delivered with full theatrical ham. Then try “Burn It Down” for the rock side, “Danger on the Dance Floor” for maximum melodrama, and “The Girl and the Clockwork Dragon” for the band’s storytelling instincts at their darkest and best, a grim little fantasy about a king, his knights, and a dragon who deserved better.
And then there is “WEIRD,” which might as well be a Darkfaery anthem. It is a song for the bullied, the strange, the outcast, and everyone who eventually decides they would not trade their weirdness for anything.
Clockwork adventure for people who still believe weird is a compliment.
We said that earlier, and we meant it.
The deep catalog rewards digging too: two volumes of Incognito: Cog Covers reimagine pop songs through the band’s brass-fitted lens, including a gloriously sinister take on “Pink Elephants on Parade.” Recent years have also brought one-off treats, including “Old Merkwerkee,” a Wild West single about a frontier town besieged by hailstones and robot buffalo.
As one does.
The Cog is Dead started as a studio-only project, building an audience through early social media for six years before ever playing a live show. Their first performance came in 2012, when a convention offered them an opening slot for Abney Park. From there, the band moved into convention performances, tours with fellow steampunk acts, live concert films, and a long-running place in the steampunk music community.
Today, The Cog is Dead continues as an independent, Patreon-supported project, with Mondelli writing, recording, and releasing music from his own creative workshop. The live side is rarer now, but not gone. In 2026, John Sprocket is scheduled to appear with Professor Elemental at Cogs & Clockwork in Fergus, Ontario, for two special North American shows.
That is twenty years of independent, fan-supported, gloriously uncommercial music about time travel and clockwork grief.
There is a lesson in that for every artist reading this. The band whose founding myth is about a craftsman refusing to accept that his beautiful obsolete thing is worthless has spent two decades proving the point.
Nobody asked for songs about robot buffalo.
They made them anyway.
The people who needed them found them.
The cog is dead.
The cog is doing fine, actually.
The cog has a Patreon.
Happy International Steampunk Day, dark hearts.
Wind your watches.
That wraps our Steampunk Day listening party: one airship, three robots, and a time machine. Which steampunk acts should we cover next? Tell us in the comments. The time ship has room.
Tags: the cog is dead, steampunk, steampunk music, dark cabaret, music review, listening notes, international steampunk day, independent artists, john sprocket
Sources:
https://steampunk-explorer.com/performers/cog-dead
https://steampunk-explorer.com/news/new-music-abney-park-steam-powered-giraffe-and-cog-dead
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