The Test Drive: Paper Anthem – The Year You’ll Never Get Back

Paper Moon has today released their new album titled ‘The Year You’ll Never Get Back’. While the title is an obvious ode to the year that was 2020, there is much more here. We get a set of lush and polished soundscapes that span the gambit of songwriting. Many colors. Many flavors. The hooks are as varied as the almost genre-hopping majesty. We get stripped songs followed by almost orchestrated. The effortless laid back feeling of some songs (like ‘Mistakes’) stick out. The distinctness of the guitars in each track is a signature sound to me.

There is a lot here to ingest. Do yourself a favor: play this on the most expensive sound system you can find and listen with open ears.

About Paper Anthem

After support throughout Canada and the US for the previous two albums, Paper Anthem bring their most exposing creation yet. Among the 11 new tracks, Joseph touches on themes of body dysmorphia, immigration, the erosion of friendships, and a story of lovers trapped within a telepathic dream singularity.

Many of the songs written for the album date back to 2016, when Hitchcock was going through a difficult time emotionally and personally: “My life had fallen apart… I had to move back home and get a job at Walmart. I got a little too into conspiracy theories. I became totally isolated to everything that keeps someone human.”

The album was recorded across a number of years, mostly in California. Hitchcock began tracking the album in Oakland in 2017, but also recorded a bit in Los Angeles in 2018 and Kent during the summer of 2019. The album was then mixed (Kristofer Harris, Ghostpoet, Belle and Sebastian) in the summer of 2019, and sent to London for mastering (John Davis, Foals, Snow Patrol) before lying in wait for another year and a half.

Hitchcock chose to collaborate with two producers, Christopher Daddio from Oakland art-rock quartet Everyone Is Dirty, returning after producing Hitchcock’s second release, and Fraser McCulloch, the creatively frenetic LA-based producer of bands Chaos Chaos — including their cult hit track Can You Feel It?, notably featured on Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty—and Milagres.

“I think my first two albums have a lot of hope for the future — about finding the right person, getting to the right place. This one is just about devastation and destruction… All there is going through the negativity, getting away from it, forever changed. Coming out of that, and hopefully being a better version of yourself, is what this album came to mean to me as I put the songs together, and I hope others can relate to it.”

Photo by Monica Ramsey.

LINKS:
https://paperanthem.com
https://www.facebook.com/paperanthem
https://twitter.com/paperanthemband
https://instagram.com/paperanthem
https://paperanthem.bandcamp.com
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK6AGPU6dFmbUKCZhMgMMvg