interrobang!?

Today Switchfoot released their 12^th full album interrobang. Even by Switchfoot’s standards this is an incredible record. Born of the trauma of the past couple of years, it holds a powerful message about community and connection, the songs forming a continuous thesis from start to finish. The lyrics are honest and poetic, the music brave and creative, the guitar tones gorgeous, and the vocals sublime.

Beloved opens the album the way one opens the pages of a book and begins to read. It comes in softly, posing questions and vulnerable half-thoughts, setting everything out like the introduction to an essay, inviting the listener in as the music builds to a truly epic, euphoric height: ‘maybe, maybe… come, let’s explore this together’.

lost ‘cause has a raw, mid 00’s rock vibe with a strong beat and guitar riff happily recalling Delirious? for me, a fragile, angsty energy running through it, expressing the nervous fears of what happens if we don’t overcome our division.

Fluorescent is superficially a song of infatuation with an unsuitable girl, but the more I listen the more I hear beneath the metaphor of the moth drawn to a false light a second layer of metaphor; the song actually explores our addiction to screens, and search for connection in a false world of social media that can distract us from the real. The verses are quirky and sparse, the guitars coming in more heavily under the chorus and lifted by powerful backing vocals.

if I were you is a fun song musically, harking back to Switchfoot’s most playful side that’s given us the likes of Daylight To Break and Don’t Want Your Money over the years and not often expressed on studio albums. It explores the idea of seeing each other’s perspectives, using quirky, questioning chord progressions.

The album then moves to the introspective. the bones of us is a tender heart wrencher, a soft and dreamlike jam about looking back on a now fractured relationship, tracing the breaks back to earlier days of love and laughter and wondering how to move forward and heal. Although again superficially about a personal relationship, and this time I think genuinely so, it also applies to the broken discourse of the national conversation, appealing to love of country to want to work things out.

Splinter is an angsty rock track, over-repeated lyrics and driving beat building a neurotic and unsettling sense of dis-ease before the chorus releases the tension with yells and screams, gutteral as Out Of Control and Connect With The Spine. I’m the problem here, I’m where these issues start.

I need you to be wrong takes the unease in a new direction. With its slinky, questioning vibe it ponders why we always seem to want to be right at all costs to relationship. Maybe all along we both were wrong? Maybe? The groove is infectious and I can’t stop moving to it, the vocal interlude that bursts into the bridge totally intoxicating.

the hard way feels like another foray back to the 00s, this time more of a post punk indie belter, and a lot of fun, though the lyrics carry a raw honesty acknowledging the mistakes that have pushed others away.

Then wolves lumbers in with groaning strings, a grungy, hypnotic and edgy track in the same dark mood as Slow Down My Heartbeat or Overthrow. It breathes of inner fears, anxieties and battles for hope as it slowly circle upwards towards a glimmer of light, trancelike with Jon’s low-fi vocal, recorded on a laptop decades past.

backwards in time feels like the closest link to Native Tongue, with a little of the slick, melancholy expansiveness of Oxygen and sway of The Strength To Let Go, though lyrically it feels deeper and more complex, very much at home on this record. It is an emotional, nostalgic piece, longing for simpler times, wishing for a second try to put things right. Tim’s lead vocals come piercing through in the second verse, lifting the song into a different dimension, before he joins with Jon in a perfect, soaring harmony.

And concluding the study, electricity rounds out the album with an appropriately retro, Beatlesesque feel, daring us to put our phones down and hang out, putting away the electronic world for the real electricity of human connection.

The whole album is a coherent and logical train of thought, dreamy and edgy yet challenging us to look within to begin to cross the distance we create between ourselves and others, bookended beautifully by its introduction and conclusion. The feel musically is very much in the same vein as the EPs Oh!, Eastern Hymns For Western Shores and The Edge Of The Earth, but with plenty of links to be found to the studio albums spanning their entire career all the way back to Chin.

To me, it feels like home from the opening notes; this is the album I’ve always known they were capable of, some of their best work previously hidden away on b-sides and EPs. I’d dreamed they’d make the album some day but never imagined they would, that whilst true to themselves it would be too much of an acquired taste to put out there. And yet, this is what they have done. And it is a masterpiece of careful craftsmanship and stunning artistry.