Back in October we previewed In Airports, the second album Atlanta-based dream pop outfit Orchid Mantis has released in 2025, and one which sees Thomas Howard explore the very meaning and purpose of his continued commitment to writing songs. “What does it mean to commit to a life making music?” we asked in our piece. “And how might it help chart all that is lost and preserved over the years?” Released via Start-track, the record which emerged might be the clearest embodiment of the project to date. “The result feels like the culmination of everything Orchid Mantis has done to date, returning to old styles and techniques as readily is it breaks new ground, and thus becomes something of a mission statement for the project,” we continued. “A declaration of intent to give the past and future equal billing, full of the spirit which has been pieced together over the years yet open to possibility.”
With this sense of possibility comes a wider sonic palette, Howard choosing to sacrifice tightness and order so that he might encompass all of the styles which have informed his work over the the previous decade. “I sort of underwent a crisis as I became a more confident producer and instrumentalist,” he explains. “The more I could imitate or recreate a sound, the more I would confront demos I’d made and think ‘this is good, but it doesn’t feel like it’s mine.’ This was a new problem for me. I scrapped two albums worth of semi-finished material, carrying my personal favorites over to this final release. As a result, it’s probably my messiest record, but I grew to appreciate that. It’s a full genre-map of everything I’ve made over the last ten years. I made sure every song meant a lot to me.”
Fittingly, the changeable nature of the sound matches the themes of the record. In Airports was named for a period in which Howard found himself stuck in an airport for almost a week, left with nothing to do but watch people and wait. The surreal experience offered what might be the ultimate image of ephemerality, the people around him constantly changing, his own time ticking down as the delayed flight approached. Orchid Mantis has long employed a dreaminess but here it carries a confessional, reflective edge, as though newly aware of the shifting world around it, and the slow, gradual losses accumulated over time.
The idea is present from the very first track, ‘Generation Loss’, titled after the technological phenomenon where data degrades which each copying process. Howard positions personal memory as a similarly fragile thing, vulnerable to decay. But while there is sadness in the realisation, there is something warmer too. Call it fondness, call it love, the feelings all the more meaningful for the transience of their focus, and the purpose of art only deepened in its conservational efforts. “I know you / in the rearview / passage of time / falls behind you,” as Howard sings in the rich, romantic ‘Comedown Phase’. We’re constantly losing everything we’ve been given, which makes attempt at preservation all the more beautiful.
In Airports is out now via Start-Track and available from Bandcamp.
