"Flam" kicks off with a cinematic drone, followed by what sounds like water torture droplets, and a cacophony of clocks, and music boxes from childhood, and maybe something underwater.

Something like a title arrives on the aural screen as GTD get down to the kind of business we love them for: that querying conversation between Steve Gunn’s guitar and John Truscinski’s drums and percussion, though here they venture into new territory, as Steve explains—

“This 'Flam' session was open and experimental for us. We deliberately did not have a lot of ideas, and wanted to see where a more spontaneous approach could take us. In the studio we were able to set up a few different stations; a synth area, guitar area, drums, and other effects going on in the control room with the engineer. We moved around freely to our different stations and tried whatever we were feeling. We did a lot of listening.”

Are you familiar with the GTD soundscapes? Have you ridden their ebbs/waves/tsunamis to those strange, dreamy, cellular places? It operates far from the smartphone-wielding, terrestrial grind. It feels like discovery, wonder. Things sparkle.

The song “Fin,” for instance. A wistful guitar rides atop relentless subconscious humming. The humming rises. The guitar pokes around. Then it finds its stride, its gallop. Do you struggle with the internal noise, the minute-by-minute swings, the way it can all feel so totally untenable, then suddenly it lifts, there’s levity, even hints of rapture, and how the hell did we even get here? So does this music.

“Conviction” moves celestially, atop a heartbeat. The guitar feels exploratory, as if looking around, taking in. Then something cataclysmic happens, and for a few suspended seconds, we’re in whatever that cataclysmic thing is, perhaps a planet exploding, maybe the Big Bang. And now it’s softening, opening.

“We didn’t have much of an agenda with it and it wasn’t clear what the overall direction of the record would be,” says John. “Listening back to it, I think there’s something like a process of wrestling with transition. A lot of the tunes feel like hibernation or something waiting to be born. It feels like a winter record to me. By the end it feels like the listener has undergone the journey with us. The last tune, 'For Ika,' sounds like it’s ready to move into the next phase, as the record ends."

The next phase, or rather, the afterglow—one of the true delights of this record. The way riffs and rhythms lodge in the head and soundtrack and score and maybe even tour guide our inner ponderings. Like half-remembered dreams. Like things we reach for but can’t quite touch.

“John and I put in so much time playing over the years that we developed a language together,” says Steve. “We kept at it and it started taking different shapes. Our past recordings were us going in and playing the pieces we wrote together, and we prepared by playing a lot before recording. That gave more structure to what we were doing. But this session was different and less structured. There’s a wider view happening. We just tried to follow the music to whatever path it was on.”

-Jamie Brisick, December 2024-