Collection: STRAY FOSSA

After three years of living and working together, the start of 2021 found the members of Stray Fossa split across continents. It is then perhaps not surprising that many of the songs on the indie trio’s upcoming second album, Closer Than We’ll Ever Know, (out June 2022 via Born Losers Records) are about distance. In some tracks, this is distance in time, reflected by a memory or longing for the past/future. In others, the narrative centers more on what separates us physically or mentally – the negative space in which we navigate (or fail to navigate) our relationships with ourselves and others. Distance not only follows the album thematically but also shaped the writing and production process. In place of a shared house, all tracks were carefully pieced together in bedroom studios and living rooms in Hamburg, Munich, and Salem, Massachusetts – with some recording done in Charlottesville, Virginia, where brothers, Nick and Will Evans, and Zach Blount formed Stray Fossa in early 2018. With collaborative songwriting on scattered iPhone notes and shared project folders, the band managed to virtually re-create their attic studio. Will, who produces all of Stray Fossa’s releases, shares, “we made a conscious effort to let the initial emotion become the final product. This often meant mixing in audio from the original demos, instead of re-recording anything.” The album is a bold evolution sonically and thematically from the band’s debut, With You For Ever (2021, self-released). If their first album – written and recorded while quarantined together in early 2020 – struggles at times with the collective anxiety, isolation and confinement of that period, the band’s dancier, more expansive follow-up, could be considered a reemergence, a cautious shift towards anticipation.

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