Existential fear and social collapse mark The Former Site Of The New Pornographers
The Vancouver band’s 10th album is all too aware of what most of us are feeling like these days, and rather than acting as a distraction or rebuttal to the state of the world, it invites us to look straight at it.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the New Pornographers for the past few years, then The Former Site Of—the group’s 10th and latest LP—might come as a bit of a surprise. Gone is the ebullient, effervescent indie-pop collective turning every refrain into an anthemic sing-along, accelerating every rhythm an extra 20 bpm and generally coming across like the epitome of a rousing and uplifting rock and roll band. In its place, as with much of the world, is something more downbeat, more melancholy, more pained at the effort needed to maintain optimism in the face of encroaching darkness. If you’re looking for the latest power-pop sugar-rush of a “The Laws Have Changed” or “The Bleeding Heart Show,” move along. This is the former site of such energy.
Hints of the band’s second act began appearing in the more subdued, meandering melodies of 2019’s In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights, the first release to be solely written by singer-guitarist A.C. Newman. But the new incarnation of the band really took shape post-pandemic, as 2023’s Continue As A Guest began a new process of songwriting, spurred largely by lockdown isolation. Newman found himself alone in his studio, tinkering with parts, honing the driving elements of the song before sending them out to his bandmates to lay down their respective parts. He discovered a new way of working, which has fully transformed not just the band’s artistic process (“Now I can get the skeleton of a song together first,” he says, “before bringing it to the band and running from there”), but profoundly shifted the tone and tenor of the music. It was the first New Pornographers album to feel like its pleasures weren’t immediately apparent, but rather had to be sat with awhile before they revealed themselves.
And if Continue As A Guest was the beginning of a more muted, refined sound, The Former Site Of is steeped in it. This is a record with no worries about aggressive hooks or triumphant singalongs. Newman’s songwriting has become ruminative, reflective, with far more emphasis on creating a mood than perfecting yet another verse-chorus-verse banger. (There’s nary a Neko Case standalone vocal track, even, which used to be a hallmark of their releases.) Were it not for the signature elements of his writing—the bold harmonies, his distinctive voice, the vocal arrangements that start at the end of one measure and end at the beginning of the next—you could be forgiven for thinking this was a wholly different band. In place of all the joy and rambunctiousness, we’ve got existential fears, meditations on the precarity of life, and non-stop anxiety about death, decay, and social collapse. Are we having fun yet?
If all this makes the record sound like a bit of a buzzkill, that’s because it is, though not in a bad way. The Former Site Of is all too aware of what most of us are feeling like these days, and rather than acting as a distraction or rebuttal to the state of the world, it invites us to look straight at it—or rather, askance at it via the music, like the sonic equivalent of a George Saunders story. It attempts to find the beauty in the darkness, the solace in the sadness, and the reasons for hope amid the evidence for despair. “Gotta keep those spirits up / while we’re all waiting to be saved,” Newman sings on album opener “Great Princess Story,” and by album’s end, if he hasn’t necessarily raised your spirits, he’s done a pretty thorough job of reflecting them back to us in a way that reassures the listener: Hey, don’t forget, you’re not alone in this.
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