Amigo The Devil

Miami, a dropped-out film degree and a borrowed name

Danny Kiranos was born in Miami on 26 June 1987 and started moving around the country at seventeen. He enrolled at the Los Angeles Film School intending to make horror films and dropped out, went to culinary school instead, and ended up working in the brewing industry before music became the job. The stage name arrived in San Francisco, which remains his base.

The horror-film detour is the useful biographical fact, because the early Amigo the Devil material behaves like genre cinema: a banjo, a voice with more gravel in it than the arrangement seems to warrant, and lyrics that walk straight at murder, addiction and self-loathing without flinching or winking too hard. The tag that stuck to him — dark folk, or murderfolk — came from listeners trying to file a thing that sat between American folk, country and the heavy-metal rooms he was actually playing in.

He has been explicit about where the writing comes from. Leonard Cohen showed him that an unconventional voice is no barrier; Tom Waits demonstrated that an artist can range widely and remain recognisable in every direction; Fiona Apple is the artist he has called his longest-standing favourite, admired for releasing few records and making each one count. Storytelling, he has said, is the most obvious aspect of the whole project.

The records, and the widening net

The catalogue starts small and self-released: the EPs Manimals in 2010, Diggers in 2013 and Decompositions in 2015, alongside the album Volume 1 in the same year. Everything Is Fine followed in 2018 through Regime Music Group and did the work of turning a cult live act into a recording one. Born Against arrived on 16 April 2021 on Liars Club, the label Kiranos co-created with Regime, and moved away from the macabre subject matter of the debut towards doubt and faith — intention against purpose, discovery against instinct, in his own framing at the time.

Yours Until the War Is Over, released on 23 February 2024 on Liars Club Records and Regime Music Group, is the broadest record he has made: thirteen tracks, produced by Kiranos with David Talley, with Kevin Zinger, Ivory Daniel and Kiranos as executive producers. Reviewing it for the Austin Chronicle, Michael Toland wrote that Kiranos casts a wide musical net, drawing on Cohen's fatalistic romanticism, Waits's dark-humoured eccentricity and Tom Russell's narrative flow, and balancing understated craft with full-throated vocal performances. Americana Highways called it an unvarnished, percussion-heavy collection of storyteller's songs and pointed to the opener Hanging by the Roots, the banjo sprint Once Upon a Time at Texaco Pt. 1 and the addiction song Cannibal Within.

The critical line on that record is consistent: the true-crime fixation that got him noticed has been absorbed into something with more literary patience behind it. He toured it hard, including a support run with Flogging Molly.

June 2025: the fire

In June 2025 a fire destroyed Kiranos's home and very nearly everything in it. The losses were not replaceable: original artwork, handwritten lyric books, decades of demos, a collection of curiosities, family keepsakes. His girlfriend Abbey's dog, Kobe, died in the blaze. A GoFundMe was set up to help him recover and has remained open since.

The first music after it appeared on 19 December 2025. New Kind of Lonely is an acoustic song recorded in a hotel conference room while he was on tour in Tasmania, with David Talley — the same collaborator who co-produced the 2024 album. It was his first new release in getting on for two years. Americana UK described a track with life in the playing rather than shiny studio perfection, which is a fair account of a song cut in a conference room by someone who had lost his tape archive.

Kiranos has kept the song deliberately open. He framed it around being alone in a new space for the first time, said the only place hope is found is in perspective, and credited a conversation at a Tasmanian airport in which someone told him he was not starting from zero but starting from experience. He has also said plainly that people take songs for what they need them to be in the moment, and that not everyone will have the same kind of lonely.

Where things stand in 2026

No follow-up album has been announced. What exists instead is a very full touring year. Through June 2026 he ran a string of dates across the American west and midwest — McMenamins Edgefield in Oregon on 11 June, KettleHouse Amphitheater in Montana on 13 June, Gesa Pavillon in Spokane on 14 June, Mission Ballroom in Denver on 20 June, then the Salt Shed in Chicago, Skully's in Columbus, Vibrant Music Hall in Waukee and the Everwise Amphitheater in Indianapolis across 25–28 June — part of which was spent supporting the Dead South.

The summer was festivals: two nights at Fire in the Mountains at Red Eagle Campground in East Glacier Park, Montana on 24 and 25 July, Warped Tour at Long Beach on 26 July, Hoochenanny Whiskey Festival at Perinton Center Park Amphitheater in Fairport, New York on 16 August, plus Bourbon & Beyond.

In July 2026 he announced a fall North American headline tour, fifteen dates from August into October, with Liam St. John opening most of them. It begins properly at Empire Live in Albany on 15 September and runs through Boston on the 17th, Montreal on the 18th, Quebec City on the 19th, Ottawa and Toronto to the 22nd, then a midwest leg through Grand Rapids, Louisville, Bloomington, Milwaukee, Sioux Falls and Omaha from 24 to 30 September, finishing in the south at Fayetteville, Birmingham and Chattanooga between 2 and 4 October. The stated peg for the run is New Kind of Lonely.

An audience that sings the verses

The relationship with the crowd is the unusual part of this act and the reason the shows scale the way they do. In 2019 the mayor of Austin, Steve Adler, proclaimed 16 November Amigo the Devil Day, which says something about how deep the following goes in particular cities.

Reviewers keep noticing the same thing. Writing about a May 2025 show, one reviewer described a room packed with longtime fans who knew the catalogue well enough that Kiranos could drop the instruments mid-song and let them carry a verse a cappella. The running theme of his stage talk is an invitation to attendees to be whatever they are, which is a plainer and more durable proposition than the murder-ballad packaging suggests.