Tobias - Two Birds (2022) Hi Res

After 13 years in New York, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter Tobias did what so many artists do when the sensory overload of city life becomes too much. Seeking out greener, quieter pastures in which to write new music, Tobias booked it to Denton, Texas, a smaller city with a long and rich musical history, once home to Roy Orbison and Nora Jones. “13 years in New York was giving me brain worms,” Tobias recalled. On Two Birds, their label debut and second full-length album, the creative benefits of this newfound proximity to nature are abundant, culminating in a visionary and compulsively listenable record that lays honest, insightful lyrics against a lush backdrop of harsh metals and rhythmic folk. It’s no wonder friends who got to listen to the music during its inception said it reminded them of the first album they ever bought. The record is a kind of mission statement, intimate and inspired, borne of seclusion and intense contemplation: of youth, of reinvention, of the self, and even of quantum physics. It whispers in your ear, and then it howls.

“I’m stumbling out of my house into the river bed,” Tobias sings, embracing earthly delights in lyrics that flow like a stream of consciousness, or a stream itself. Though the threads of Tobias’ past as an experimental producer crafting beats in New York’s underground rap scene are woven throughout the project, Two Birds was their first opportunity to record music with band and outside producers, allowing Tobias to sharpen their own creative process and focus more deliberately on storytelling and composition. The sounds are warm and expansive; the lyrics are brooding and astute, capturing a youthful sense of wonder and disillusionment. “What’s that thing that makes you a person?” Tobias ponders in the opening line of “Remember,” a cozy acoustic highlight. In moments throughout the album, their concerns are no less than cosmic while writing, Tobias was fascinated by the double-slit experiment, one of the enduring mysteries of physics. But the music is grounded, a ballad of candor and creativity, generated from what Tobias calls “the worst period of my life.” A spirited follow-up to Thread, Tobias’s 2020 debut, Two Birds announces a singer-songwriter in bloom, reveling in the haunts and thrills of the natural world.