Once you reach a certain age, time becomes…strange. We are taught ad infinitum that time goes on our independent variable axis, and its scale remains equidistant. But again, after you hit forty, it becomes more like one of those orange and white logarithmic paper situations.

Dial Everything is The Farewell State newest album. It’s a long in the making album, as in, fourteen bloody years from start to finish. We all go through that start/stop staccato rut in life. It’s nice to see -or hear- when someone at least manages to break free.

And, fuck it, it’s okay to take your time. It’s okay to change your perspective again and again. Creatives shouldn’t stagnate. Tearing every draft to infinitesimal iotas and then integrating fits perfectly with the running theme of the album, where Simon Roberts‘ lyrics reflects on holding hands in lieu of building walls, on breaking the past, on wiping a slate clean as loud as possible. It’s an album that calls for new beginnings, and, honestly, life has so many cycles that it seems we’re always at the tutorial stage of said restart loops.

You can feel how the influences sailed through time as The Farewell State did. Hints of mid to late 00s Britpop flourish with strong bravado, as seen in opening track, ‘Songs of hope & understanding’. In ‘Year Zero’, the decisively alt-country inspired album swings and sways from blue tinted abandoned community centres to sundrenched memories of times long gone, just like the scene moved from No Depression to now abandoned personal websites and wattpads.

Reflection doesn’t always come with downer songs. And although you might not go and jump into the pit to these songs, you won’t lit a cig under the pale moon and wander through old photos and super 8 films of relatives long gone, falling in a loop that might resemble a downward spiral.

‘Break the past’ and ‘Fragments of film’ are the stand out tracks. Moody post-punk tempos, hanging to deft bass lines, bringing new life to songs that were broken back, rendered, and re-built, from the ground up.

Dial Everything is a ship of Theseus situation, I know, but sometimes, starting over is the only move forward. Lance Henrikssen once said it: “maybe a step back will move you two steps forward.” No time like today to do so.

—Sam J. Valdés López