Caleb Nichols Photo credit: Aidan Dillon
Stone Age Is Back, the third solo album from singer-songwriter and poet Caleb Nichols is a fascinating and urgent addition to his growing catalog. Like a PhD dissertation in contemporary indie rock and alt-folk, the album pulls from disparate strands of Nichols’ universe to form an amalgam of queer ecology, rustic punk, existential folk, frenetic indie pop, spoken word, experimental jazz, and Neil Young-esque shredding.
Title track “Stone Age Is Back” finds Nichols at his most Young-esque, with acoustic guitars and drums that invoke the godfather of grunge’s 70’s period, and solos that bring to mind Rust Never Sleeps. Lyrically, this is the song that most directly tackles climate crisis, and finds Nichols delivering an angry screed against the billionaire class: “No shade, no shame / take all the money and / build a bunker / fill it with your billions,” he snarls in a triple-tracked vocal that brings to mind Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock. “Woulda, should, shoulda, could / coulda done almost anything / you lied, you lied, you lied / you lied about everything / and we will pay the price / of being so polite”. Especially poignant after the firestorm that ravaged LA in early 2025, this track cuts to the quick and takes no prisoners.
The new LP, which is out October 3rd on Royal Oakie Records is a meditation on grief— but not in the ways you’d expect. Across thirteen dynamic and lovingly produced indie gems, Nichols interrogates the grief, guilt, complicity, joy, anger, fear, and dissociative feelings that come along with living through a mass extinction event. Stone Age Is Back isn’t really a political album, or an album explicitly about the climate crisis—rather, it’s an album that explores what it means to be living and dying right now, in this moment of extraordinary change.
Recorded in Oakland, CA, the band adhered to a first take-best take rule, and moved quickly, recording the entire album in just five days. Produced by Nichols (Port O’Brien, Grand Lake), and mixed & engineered by Jay Pellicci (Deerhoof, Om, 31 Knots), Stone Age Is Back is sonically immaculate even while the performances themselves exude an immediacy that might remind you of early Modest Mouse, or UK punks The Tubs.
The album features a bevy of influences: from the landscapes of North Wales, where Nichols wrote the album, to the poetry and theory he read during his dissertation, to the UK DIY bands that inspired him sonically. Stone Age Is Back is a well-curated and wild ride, fitting for his return to music after completing his PhD in queer ecopoetry. The doctor is in.
Royal Oakie Records is thrilled to release the album worldwide on October 3rd 2025, available on CD/Cassette/Digital.
What is the best dream you’ve ever had?
CALEB NICHOLS: I often have dreams that I’m meeting Sir Paul McCartney. In these dreams, he’s always really genuine and really nice: a very good hang. Sometimes we’re just eating lunch. Other times, it’s more musical. It’s never been scary. The best dream I had was when we were recording Stone Age Is Back and in the dream I gave him a copy of one of my albums and he really, really liked it, and because of that, we became great friends.
Why are you afraid of flying on airplanes? And why do you do it then?
CALEB NICHOLS: I don’t know, but I’ve always had a very big phobia of flying, and of being up high. I don’t like being on bridges, or in a building that’s more than 10 floors. My mentor, Dr. John C. Hampsey, writes this about Nietzsche, in an essay that’s coming out in Lit Hub soon:
“Nietzsche, the prince of deontology, admits in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) — what is great in us is that we are ‘a bridge and not a goal’ and what can be loved in us is that we are always ‘a going-across—a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying still”… each moment willing the ‘downfall’ of that which we were.”
I think that has something to do with it: my Nietzschean fear that I may be an übermensch, and therefore that I need to limit myself by being afraid of the things that make me aware that I am traversing great distances and heights. It’s really very on-the-nose.
Once, before he wrote this, we were having drinks at this bar where you can sit in an old vault, and in the wall of the vault, there is a loose brick; people write themselves notes and leave the notes there— like wishes. We both wrote notes to our future selves in the vault, and I had written something like “you are always on the bridge” in an effort to sort of combat the fear I was feeling about travelling. So this is very much a big theme for me: being afraid and overcoming the fear.
Do you want to talk about your new album?
CALEB NICHOLS: It is not my finest work. That would be my 2023 album Let’s Look Back, which, technically speaking, is probably the most well-produced album I have made. But there’s a lot to love about Stone Age Is Back, including the more DIY approach we took (I mean, sort of DIY; we did go to the same studio we always go to, but we did thing much more live and did far less overdubbing, and zero sessions after the initial five days of tracking). So while the sound is different— there are fewer layers, and there is less actual ‘production’ happening, I feel really good about the outcome, which is this 43-minute long album that tries to approach the meaning of living through the beginning of ecological crisis and collapse.
These songs are all new as well. I wrote them all between 2022 and 2024, with the exception of “Big Soul,” which has been kicking around since 2005 actually.
Anything else to say?
I’m just a little he/they trying my best to keep focused on writing (both music and poetry and some prose here and there), and trying to survive as best I can in this strange, sinister, beautiful world.
Stone Age Is Back is definitely part of that struggle — the externalization of it. I think the best song on the record is “Hag Stone,” lyrically and musically. I can’t believe how few people have listened to it. I hope you become one of the few, dear reader.
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