Trying Not to Have a Thought [Opaque White LP], Algernon Cadwallader, Vinyl

Trying Not to Have a Thought, arriving September 12th via Saddle Creek, isn’t just the first Algernon Cadwallader album since 2011’s Parrot Flies. It’s also the first with their original lineup—vocalist-bassist Peter Helmis, guitarists Joe Reinhart and Colin Mahony, and drummer Nick Tazza—since Algernon’s seminal 2008 debut, Some Kind of Cadwallader. Shortly after that album was recorded—and long before it was heralded as a lodestar for the 2010s “emo revival”—Tazza and Mahony departed the band. Despite their looming influence on the aforementioned “revival,” Algernon broke up in 2012 following the release of Parrot Flies and remained stubbornly deceased until their fiendishly anticipated resurrection in 2022.

Algernon Cadwallader are certainly cognizant of their cult legacy, a status that's transformed their fanbase into a unique convergence of graying punk lifers and fresh-faced teens who first discovered “midwest emo” on TikTok. Given the long gap between albums and the critical acclaim they’ve garnered in that time, it would’ve been understandable for the guys to feel pressured to live up to their own standards while making this new record. Thankfully, the opposite was the case.

With Trying Not to Have a Thought, Algernon Cadwallader juggle intrinsic musical connection and shrewd lyrical intention with remarkable poise. The album’s title perfectly captures that dual approach: the effort to resist being mentally bogged down by the bottomless list of daily atrocities, and the band’s decision to let their unspoken connection guide this rejuvenated take on their classic sound. “This is just what comes out of us when these four people get in a room,” Helmis says. And this record is exactly that: an Algernon Cadwallader album that's leisurely, intensely, tremendously their own.