At the risk of sounding pretentious, you might say that New Laconia doesn’t release songs in the conventional sense; they provide us with ongoing sonic chapters and thought-provoking musical statements, fragments of a larger story where philosophy, memory, and experimentation all coexist in the same musical space.
“Journey to the Past”, the latest single, is precisely what I am talking about. At the heart of the song we find its central character, The Traveler, a lost soul drifting between dimensions, who wanders into the Stardust Bear Bazaar — half mythical meeting space, half cosmic waiting room — and finds only fractured déjà vu and half-remembered ghosts.
Musically, it wanders through a varied rock landscape, from punchy, fist-in-the-air anthemics to more subtle lulls, from searing crescendos to more understated atmospheres. When taken as a whole, there is something decidedly proggy about the way the song unfolds.
But if this is prog, it’s prog stripped of its capes and codpieces; and if it’s rock music, it’s rock with one foot in a more cinematic realm and the other in a philosophy textbook. Somewhere between the two realms, the answer lies. And the further into the song you go, the less categorizable the song becomes, walking not just a fine line between a few genres, but deftly dancing along numerous demarcations at will.
And yet, beneath the narrative and concepts, “Journey to the Past” is heartbreakingly simple: it’s a note to the artist’s younger self, the 17-year-old who began making music merely through a feeling of compulsion, simply because it was something that had to be done. It’s this kind of simple honesty that permeates every beat, every cinematic atmosphere, and every moment where nostalgia and raw emotion vie for space, somehow grounding it in honesty and authenticity, even when the music is at its most grand.
This is New Laconia doing what they do best — making music that’s less a listening experience and more an existential encounter. When was the last time a rock song, for want of a better term, delivered that?
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