Return Forever (2024 The Fourth Wall album)

For The Fourth Wall’s new album Return Forever (out March 15, 2024 via DevilDuck Records), Stephen Augustin has demonstrated a real gift for infusing fairly straightforward songwriting and visual presentation with complex and subversive ideas. For the single “Darkness of Heart” it starts out fairly folky and pastoral with Augustin going about some mundane home activities and having some coffee but then the song blasts out with bombastic rhythms and blaring guitar yet overlaid with vocal harmonies one might more expect to hear in an old indiepop song. The title is obviously a nod to Joseph Conrad’s classic 1899 novella Heart of Darkness but taking the theme of the novel of colonialism and imagining that dynamic in reverse with the colonized to integrate into the colonizer’s world only to find that not everything is as promised or presented. In the song we hear a contemplation of the aftermath of that experience with the lines “I can never tell/if I repeat what I repel/become the heart of darkness to quell/the darkness just to start it all again.” By going through that process of imagining a different, even parallel, history creatively, Augustin invites us to imagine a world to come that whether it is ready or not will reckon with its past perhaps not all at once in dramatic fashion but in bits and peaces, spurts and stops and as messy as our own development as people. Watch the video for “Darkness of Heart” on YouTube and follow The Fourth Wall at the links below.

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The splashes of trailing guitar scrawl match the flashes of film set lights in the video for The Fourth Wall’s “Never A Part.” Directed by both Eric Harrod and Stephen Augustin based on his concept, we see singer Augustin looking uncomfortable yet accommodating the attention from the production crew and script supervisor and director. Everyone goes through what looks like Polaroid stills from the shoot like fragments of the real person only to later burn several of the photos in a campfire. Like an act of reclaiming one’s identity from it being a fragmented product without context. The song seems to be about ties of family and blood and never quite belonging or being of a new home country or culture. Augustin’s parents immigrated from Korea and the Philippines and the new The Fourth Wall album Return Forever (due out in March 2024 on DevilDuck Records) is like nine chapters of exploring the immigrant experience and the complexities of that emerge from trying to come to terms with what is known and what is unknowable about one’s own history and how that impacts one’s own identity. The song comes out of Augustin’s imagining a conversation between his own grandmother and her grandson and gets into issues of what it means to love out of what might be perceived as some kind of family obligation and biological connections and how that might overlap with an unconditional love. We hear tension and drama in the song, urgent percussion, a cyclone of noise and melody that escalates and fades out by the song’s end. And earlier we hear those underpinnings of uncertainty and fragile shimmers and fast echos of tone held together by Augustin’s soaring vocals and seeming will to hold it all together and to comprehend some elusive truth and significance to make sense of what feels like an existential conundrum. And yet the song with all of its nervy energy ends with a kind of transcendent catharsis like an acceptance of contradictions the complete knowledge of which you may never fully understand. Watch the video for “Never A Part” on YouTube and follow The Fourth Wall at the links below.