Fred Thomas announces new album 'Window in the Rhythm' (out 10/4) + stream "Embankment"

October 1, 2024

The past becomes part of the future on Window in the Rhythm, the upcoming career-defining double album from singer, songwriter, and producer Fred Thomas. Available to stream this Friday, October 4, and on limited edition Deep Blood Red Swirl vinyl November 1. Pre-order your copy today.

Alongside the announcement, Fred gives fans a sample of what to expect with the record's opening track, ?Embankment? - watch the self-shot visualizer edited by Bradley Hale below.

Having gotten the two-minute pop songs out of his system with his band Idle Ray, Window in the Rhythm splits exactly one hour of music into just seven songs. Spacious environments open up with patient, steady tempos as lonely nylon-string guitars and field recordings transition into enormous, rippling waves of slowcore distortion and buried electronic textures.

Drummer/composer Quin Kirchner?s controlled playing guides the rhythms, friends like Raw Honey?s Maggie Hopp, Michigan multi-instrumentalist Mary Fraser, and Australian songwriter Elena Dakota all contribute guest vocals, and not one but two harpists show up; Mary Lattimore weaving ambient softness on one track and Shelley Burgon?s unrelenting double harmonics driving the intensity of another.

Sometimes it feels like a conversation between former and present selves, other times like an argument between the memory and the rememberer. It?s a landscape of recurring dreams, one where long-demolished apartments Fred once lived in are connected to stores that haven?t opened yet, all the rooms viewed from above in a perpetual early November. It?s unclear if the narration is taking place in the punk house with mattresses on the floor, or if Fred is trying to make sense of the time spent there twenty years later.

By the end, he's reframed the unresolved feelings and expired energies of the past as a way to understand the present day, and to accept how time is always moving away from the now for something far stranger. It?s a gloriously positive and self-actualizing work, one free of regret or judgment that simply observes what was while hoping for new chances at understanding whatever comes next.