Forever Now and Keep Yourself Safe by Aa & Tyr

Listeners typically have an expectation of the place a song will go, tracing the lines of a familiar structure with verses, choruses, and a bridge. Much of the music we cover at Outside Noise, however, deliberately violates these expectations, and few cases present better opportunities for analysis on this front than the new record from Aa & Tyr called Forever Now and Keep Yourself Safe. While every song on this record presents a new layout, nothing here seems contrived or deliberately edgy. Instead, every track reads like one of Aa & Tyr’s diary entries, naturally following the contours of the artist’s emotional storytelling, whether that appears as a traditional song format or not. In many ways, Forever Now even subverts the subversion, pulling inspiration from the famously extensive dynamic swells of post rock but unexpectedly compacting these motions down into miniature mood swings. Great artists do whatever it takes to get their point across, and Aa & Tyr intrinsically understands this as a songwriter in ways that many may never.

-Michael