VOICE ACTOR – Sent from my Telephone
Sent from my Telephone
VOICE ACTOR
Album
Alternative
Liam Murphy
November 4, 2022
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October 4, 2026
Tracks in this feature
Tracks in this release
The LA duo After aren’t doing anything new – and that’s precisely the point.
Roughly a year on from their self-titled sequel EP comes a full-length album, Fell Asleep in the Sun. The warm blurs and crisp, florally decorated frutiger-adjacent decals of the LA duo’s first two EPs are being overshadowed.
After now walk towards a place and a sound populated by rainy underpasses and shadowy places bathed in golden hues. Still poppy and pristine, but darker than what came before. As Justine Dorsey herself sings in the opening line of the album: “Far away from where we are, there’s a place I’ve been before…”, those positive shots through the silvery filter of a digital camera have darkened.
“I close the door, on the kind of day, I don’t want to feel anymore,” she sings on the closing song.
There’s a look of those 90s/00s major label grunge refractions, the big money companies that directed their talent toward power chord laments and signalled toward darker aesthetics to move with the tide in an atmosphere adopting the grungey subculture.
But, as before, in how precisely they embody their sound, they forego mere inspiration and sound, genuinely, like an act from that time.
As they’ve said themselves, they want to sound like “Michelle Branch heard over the speakers at Target”. They are incidental and peripheral. They are disguised, in their sound, as a genuine artefact from the past. A past that, itself, was beginning to regurgitate at the dawn of the internet age.
Metal, for instance, is not a continuation of Avril Lavigne grunge pop. It does not seek to expand on the source material. It seeks to ensconce itself completely in that sound and era, with its unabashedly compressed pop-power chord guitar and references to struggling through “the mud” and “the mire”. Such sounds and imagery conjure up late-night MTV music videos. A band or solo artist swimming in the wake of A Puddle of Mudd, who, themselves, are swimming in the wake of the artists before them.
But within that pop pastiche sound After operate, they still demonstrate versatility. Do or Die unfurls with a Latin-inspired guitar, moving into a contrastingly stiff Imbruglian pop. Open Water’s discordant guitar finally launches into a lament that conjures Justine by a rainy window. Breathe Your Air pulls back more towards that floating alternative trip-hop pop that we’ve heard from them before.
if you don’t know by now somehow brings together Kroegarian chorus crooning with a foghorn belonging to a deep UNKLE cut.
With this album, After are making it clear. They are living in the past. They are not a callback. They are calling us back. As the aptly sampled Morpheus mutters in a sample on the track Fitfully: “I can only show you the door”. Whether more listeners walk through it to this strange frozen time period and join them remains to be seen.
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