Whale Fall - Sondersongs (2018)

On the third album from Los Angeles-based Whale Fall, the band's sound continues to evolve, embracing tonalities familiar to listeners of their previous work, as well as nods to a wider array of genres and shades of decades past. The tracks on "Sondersongs" — the band's first single LP following two double albums — feature elements of post-rock, dream pop, new wave, psych, folk, indie, solo piano, and classic rock, colliding across 10 cinematic instrumental tracks.

Recorded in El Sereno with engineer/producer Eric Palmquist (who manned the boards for their debut), "Sondersongs" considers the difference and similarities between each of us: strangers until we aren't; extras in one another's lives or perfect soulmates; the unknown depth of each of us barely sensed until it comes to light unexpectedly.

As defined by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the word "sonder" means:

"the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk"

The ethos of these Sondersongs encompasses stability and change, union and dissolution, each of us holding our own story within us as they collide with the stories of those around us — joining, supporting, breaking away, or tearing apart. The emotional arc of the album evokes the structure, bonds, and divisions between all of us, and ultimately the realization that we all share the same human story at the depth of ourselves.