Sub Pop The Longer This Goes On [VINYL]

There’s one thing Forth Wanderers want to make clear as they prepare to release their third album The Longer This Goes On: “We’re not back,” guitarist Ben Guterl says emphatically. It’s perhaps an unexpected sentiment to pair with the band’s first album since they parted ways seven years ago, but the band insists it’s an honest answer—they came together to record the ten intricately constructed gems that make up this new record, and they’re still figuring out what being in Forth Wanderers means to them. Listening to these songs, each a glittering celebration of vocalist Ava Trilling’s urgent and intuitive lyrics and the band’s natural musical chemistry, though, it’s hard to feel like there’s much of anything left unsaid. Filled with spit-shined melodies, chiming vocal harmonies, and slinky, slanted rhythms, the album is more expansive than just a return to form. The band isn’t afraid to take the scenic route to a hook, layering instrumental flourishes to fill in the empty spaces, creating room for Trilling’s haunting range, or repeating a riff or a lyric until it becomes a Zen koan. On The Longer This Goes On, Forth Wanderers sound more self-aware and self-assured than ever before. Just don’t call it a comeback. The road to The Longer This Goes On began in a Brooklyn coffee shop in the summer of 2021. There, Guterl and Trilling met for the first time since Forth Wanderers’ dissolution in 2018. The three years they’d been apart had deflated some of the pressures the band felt when they were touring their previous music: “We all felt free to mess around and have fun,” Guterl says. Reconnecting with bassist Noah Schifrin, guitarist Duke Greene, and drummer Zach Lorelli made playing feel “the best it had between us since we had started the band. It felt like we were in high school again.” The band reimagined the way they were used to working. “This is the first time where a lot of the music was formed organically,” Schifrin explained. “All five of us really contributed to the writing process in ways that we hadn’t before in the past,” Guterl added. The resulting album, produced under the watchful eye of Dan Howard, captures the band at their most present and unburdened, creating their sound in real time for the very first time. The lyrics are packed with confessionals broad enough to make anyone lost in the mess of an uncertain romantic limbo feel understood, yet so precisely written that it must have clearly come from lived experience. This is exactly what made Forth Wanderers both so universally relatable and specifically felt. On The Longer This Goes On, they’ve deepened that ability to pull at potent threads of romantic ennui with minimalist lyrics and lush instrumentation. Forth Wanderers aren’t sure what’s next—they’re not sure if they’ll continue to record new music or if they’ll ever perform these songs live. These recordings, then, are ten fleeting yet invaluable impressions of the time spent as a band; rekindling of friendships between high school buddies whose dreams catapulted them into the spotlight before they were old enough to drive; songs that capture the uncertainty of the future as much as their music cements their own self-confidence in the present. On The Longer This Goes On, Forth Wanderers are making music on their own terms.