Lauded as talented upstarts by everyone from Lorde to The New Yorker, Forth Wanderers were one of those bands that never got as big as they should have. Just before the American tour for their first album, the group disbanded after lead singer Ava Trilling shared that she’d been diagnosed with a mental health issue and would be stepping away from music.
This month, the New Jersey Indie outfit return after seven years, breaking their radio silence with a third studio album, The Longer This Goes On, released on Sub Pop. With them, a devout group of fans relive their youth. “Seven years believing in myself that they’ll return and to not pull the plug just yet… and that exact hope is what keeps me going in this cruel world.” goes one comment under the video to the album’s lead single, ‘7 Months.’
Forth Wanderers’ music could sucker punch anyone at the best of times – it’s not hard to see how they’ve inspired such nostalgic fervour. Dazed and dreamlike, Ava Trilling’s vocals conjure up a hazy world of Americana, stolen glances and unreachable youth. Alongside her, guitarist Ben Guterl and the rest of the group’s slanted instrumentalists craft music that doesn’t sound too far from Dinosaur Jr., Velocity Girl and the rest of the Sub Pop canon, but you could probably also imagine drifting from a college radio station at 2am.
The record’s opening track, ‘To Know Me/To Love Me,’ is propelled by a dingy, taut guitar arpeggio, gilded with feedback as Trilling’s vocals cut through the mix. “I know what you should think of me / Tell me what you think of me” she sings on the song’s chorus, suffocating under Guterl’s fuggy guitar melodies. The line is at once distant and forlorn, confrontational and nude; but Trilling speaks it with placid, unperturbed ambiguity, letting her words hang in the air like smoke. That tension – between Trilling’s delivery, her confessional subject matter, and the instrumentalists – is what makes the album work. It’s what’s always allowed Forth Wanderers to approach writing music about formative experiences without the fear of sounding hackneyed. However, though the band’s rough-hewn, languorous sentiment remains intact, there’s newfound darkness and maturity in their music too.
It’s a work marked by emotion and uncertainty – namely the band’s return, but also the crossroads between youth and adulthood and the reconciliation of old relationships. If their last, self-titled album was Forth Wanderers’ Virgin Suicides, then The Longer This Goes On feels more like Lost In Translation – older, beautiful and more oblique. There’s the spaced-out ‘Spit’, on which Trilling asks how to “spit [someone] out.” A wobbly synth, molten pedal steel and glitched guitar answer her question. The bassline on ‘Springboard’ slinks past the song’s sultry lyrics, sitting somewhere between Japanese Breakfast and The Amps, while on ‘Bluff’, sun-dappled organ and open chords swell to a melancholic climax as Trilling, self-assured, wonders, “Ain’t that fucked up?”
On their newest LP, Forth Wanderers age with their music, no longer soundtracking high-school heartaches together, but rather the growing pains, ennui and small joys of adult life. Perhaps the comments fans feel compelled to leave under their music videos explain the resonance of their music best: “I remember finding you guys in middle school. Now I’m grown working a full time job.”
