Stone Age Is Back, the third solo album from singer-songwriter and poet Caleb Nichols is a fascinating and urgent addition to his growing catalog. Like a PhD dissertation in contemporary indie rock and alt-folk, the album pulls from disparate strands of Nichols’ universe to form an amalgam of queer ecology, rustic punk, existential folk, frenetic indie pop, spoken word, experimental jazz, and Neil Young-esque shredding.
The new LP, which is out October 3rd on Royal Oakie Records is a meditation on grief— but not in the ways you’d expect. Across thirteen dynamic and lovingly produced indie gems, Nichols interrogates the grief, guilt, complicity, joy, anger, fear, and dissociative feelings that come along with living through a mass extinction event. Stone Age Is Back isn’t really a political album, or an album explicitly about the climate crisis—rather, it’s an album that explores what it means to be living and dying right now, in this moment of extraordinary change.
Recorded in Oakland, CA, the band adhered to a first take-best take rule, and moved quickly, recording the entire album in just five days. Produced by Nichols (Port O’Brien, Grand Lake), and mixed & engineered by Jay Pellicci (Deerhoof, Om, 31 Knots), Stone Age Is Back is sonically immaculate even while the performances themselves exude an immediacy that might remind you of early Modest Mouse, or UK punks The Tubs. The album features a bevy of influences: from the landscapes of North Wales, where Nichols wrote the album, to the poetry and theory he read during his dissertation, to the UK DIY bands that inspired him sonically. Stone Age Is Back is a well-curated but wild ride, fitting for his return to music after completing his PhD in queer ecopoetry. The doctor is in.
