A woman is trapped on a cruise ship. A preacher decides to go down with his town. A man at the florist finds himself lost in the meaning of the arrangement. These and other people at personal and societal extremes are the subjects of ten timely, timeless short stories collected as meticulously crafted pop songs by The New Pornographers on their forthcoming album, The Former Site Of.
The album, like Continue as a Guest, finds The New Pornographers—bandleader A.C. Newman, Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, John Collins, and Todd Fancey—expanding their already rich catalog in surprising fashion. Joined by legendary session drummer Charley Drayton (Divinyls, Keith Richards, Fiona Apple), the space contained in a New Pornographers song has never been this clearly articulated or generously textured, giving a distinct pulse to the characters whose lives spill out in Newman’s tender, evocative lyrics.
The Former Site Of adds new depth to the sound Newman shook loose through building and recording in a home studio, fine-tuning the band’s creative process far beyond the lockdown-era necessities of remote collaboration. “Having time in my studio really opened things up,” he explains. “I can get the skeleton of a song together first—just a couple of elements, the key feeling, really as little as possible—before bringing it to the band and running from there.”
Two albums into this shift, The New Pornographers are creating universes of intricately textured sound and narrative detail, every layer keyed to reveal an unexpected new facet.
As on Continue as a Guest, one of the more readily apparent layers is the way a song forms itself around a featured instrument. On The Former Site Of, it’s a mandolin which, in Carl Newman’s hands, lends lead single “Votive” its sense of acceleration as it builds from the atmospheric sweep of its synth and keyboard opening to a classic, wide-open jam.
“Hands are cupped around a match / I’m just trying to keep the lights on,” Newman sings on the track, the metaphor—hanging on despite the precarity of life—a thread that weaves through The Former Site Of. “Bonus Mai Tais” is, in a sense, about the flame going out, Newman writing directly of meeting a friend with advanced cancer for drinks, disarmed by their candor in the face of death. It is a brutally sad song, the anguish of the moment hanging in Newman’s voice, and one of the band’s most beautiful, with Neko Case’s and Kathryn Calder’s harmonies acting as the scene’s ethereal mirror.
The Former Site Of places many of its subjects on the edge of oblivion—their time growing short, their situation doomed—but hanging on. This is also true when The New Pornographers turn their focus inward as they do on “Pure Sticker Shock,” Newman’s lyrics grappling with self-worth. That they can identify themselves among such a disparate cast—even the Cassini-Huygens satellite of “Spooky Action”—ties the album together
before the final repeated lyric of its title track, the way into the heart of each of these songs warmly lit and inviting. Far from being the expected next chapter from The New Pornographers, The Former Site Of is an argument against expectation by a band that continues to evolve rather than rest on their laurels. Even in its darkest or most self-deprecating moments, there is an effervescence to the music here that is irresistible, an affirmation that the struggle of its characters and the listener, like a photograph of a distant planet, is worth it.