We’ve covered Orchid Mantis, the dream pop project of Atlanta’s Thomas Howard, several times over the years. From the early releases of 2014-15 to full length album Yellow House and most recent EP Light As Leaving, Howard has developed a distinctively backward-looking style. Found sounds are layered into nostalgic tracks of loss and memory, leading to what we’ve described as songs “concerned with the transience of life, [exploring] how what we hold dear can change in ways we could not predict.”
As evocative as the aesthetic proved, circumstances pushed the Orchid Mantis focus in a different direction. A relationship came to an end, college faded into the rear-view. Howard moved back home after years away, and all of the things that had come to represent his life had suddenly vanished. But rather that mourn the past, this time he chose to confront the present. Forthcoming full-length album Far From This World is the result. “This is the first thing I’ve recorded that doesn’t feel retrospective or past-oriented,” Howard explains. “This feels like a transitional time, and in the face of such uncertainty we often look for an escape. That’s what this album did for me.”
The newly present style is clear from the opening of latest single ‘Light Beyond (Right Now)’, the nostalgia of previous Orchid Mantis releases cast aside in favour of something more direct. “Like many tracks from the new album, [‘Light Beyond’] contains some of my most direct and personal lyrics to date,” Howard says. “This year has been a tumultuous one for my own life, involving the shedding of many things I relied on for stability in my life: moving back home after living with the same roommates for several years, the dissolution of a 3-year relationship, graduation from college, etc.”
This personal uncertainty has been mirrored by the intensification of global problems, every new emergency only reinforcing the fragility of our way of life. ‘Light Beyond (Right Now)’ exists on such precarious ground, in a world changing not in fifty years or ten but right before our eyes. As such the track is racked by anxiety and fear but there’s something else too. A hope however distant that the change might meet everything, even the systems of comfort and control that hold us back and keep us under. The idea that, within a crisis, we might (re)discover ourselves, and correct the course of things towards a better way of living.
