Noah Weinman recently announced the release of Always Repeating, his upcoming debut for Run For Cover records. Weinman’s music as Runnner has perpetually housed within it near tangible auras of intense longing, loneliness, and anxiety, but with enough tonal warmness and light to stop it succumbing to the throes of self-pity. The ten tracks on the new LP, partly composed of re-recorded tracks from his 2017 debut as well as 2020’s EP, show Weinman dealing with the feelings of immense uncertainty about his life since moving back home to Los Angeles from Ohio, not from desire or necessity, but because he simply did not know where else to go.
“I began to feel like all of the people I knew and had met maybe never really existed,” Weinman explained in a statement; as a result, isolation and existential dread are present in the music, but in a manner that is accessible to an active listener, partly because it is something that many of us are able to relate to after this especially trying year. Weinman explained “Awash,” the album’s first single:
“I wrote this song in about 15 minutes, though I had been kicking the title around for a bit. It felt like the word I was looking for, but I couldn’t get past it. I was feeling so lost and distant from everything, but I would choke on the language anytime I tried to elaborate. I eventually was able to let the song come simply and not stress the specificity too much.”
The immediacy of the track is clear – in fact, it feels like one single breath being exhaled, a desperate, cathartic attempt to get an emotional weight off one’s shoulders. Along with the track itself, Weinman’s description of the upcoming album was also something that I found myself engaging with repeatedly over the past week:
“I was just circling in my own anxiety and indecision, and now I’m back to recording those same songs again, in a world that is in many ways more uncertain than it was then. Me struggling with loneliness and anxiety is true for all of the music I write. And pandemic or not, these songs would still feel relevant. I went through it then, I’m going through it now, and I’ll probably go through it again in a few years.”
Though many may find that discouraging, I instead choose to view it as beautifully real. The battle with one’s own complex interiorities – whether that is depression, anxiety, or something just as jarring – is never truly completed; we instead simply find our own ways to process them, hopefully peeling back the layers of fear in preparation for the next encounter.
Always Repeating is out July 16 via Run For Cover Records. Pre-order it here.
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photo courtesy of artist
kid with a vinyl 