A fantastic new Fred Thomas album is dropping this week. Thomas, the Michigan indie legend and Saturday Looks Good To Me founder, was most recently heard rocking out in the trio Idle Ray, but his new solo album pivots hard from that band’s jangly, poppy, uptempo approach.

In the 2010s, Thomas dropped a trilogy of solo albums — All Are Saved, Changer, and Aftering — that played like brilliant indie rock mixtapes, jumping across genre while maintaining the same roughhewn sensibility. Thomas’ lyrics about punk-house life were sprawling, insightful, and often hilarious. The line on “Open Letter To Forever” gets me every time: “I wanted to be like, ‘Man, I’m probably a couple years younger than your father, and I’ve traded in any chance at stability for this community of people who, like, know what Black Flag is, or whatever.'”

Window In The Rhythm, which Thomas is releasing three days from now, maintains the trilogy’s talky, diaristic approach to vocals and lyrics, but musically it’s a whole new beast. Comprising seven tracks across two LPs, it stretches out in an almost post-rock way, marked by tangles of meditative guitar and arrangements that travel from a pensive quietude to somewhere grandiose.

He’s previewing the album today with the nearly nine-minute opening track “Embankment,” a flashback to a time when “life was just beginning, but death was never far from mind.” This one’s got more of the hyper-specific time-capsule lyrics that Thomas does so well. I love the way he brings these lines in and out of sync with the music’s rhythm and melody: “I made you a tape with the same Squarepusher song on it four times, but not in a row/ To mimic the way so much was haphazard, the abundance of magic in a fragmented flow.”

Thomas shared some illuminating background on the song:

In December of 1997, my friend Geoff, his mother and her boyfriend all died when the furnace at his mom’s house malfunctioned and poisoned the air while they were sleeping. He was 26 and I was 21. A completely unthinkable tragedy no matter who it happened to, but for me and all of the young punks in Michigan, this was an incalculable loss that would change everything. Geoff had started his own studio and offered amazing work at affordable rates, tracking the first 7”s for my early bands along with so much more music that might not have been recorded if he hadn’t made a space for it. After getting to know him for a few years as a client, we became super good friends and he played drums in my band Flashpapr. He was my first real peer to die, and we were both children. This song goes deep into the feelings of those times, and how it felt terrible to be excited about anything new happening while still carrying that loss. At exactly the same time Geoff died, my band Lovesick started, I moved into a new group house, finally started working at the record store I’d been wanting to get a job at for years, met a lot of people who would become lifelong best friends, and was generally experiencing the eruptive intensity and daily change that happens when you’re that age.

There’s layers and references in almost every line of this song, so it’d be a LOT to go into the finer details, but something really strange happened in the fall of 1998, almost a year removed from Geoff’s death. In Ann Arbor, where I lived, there was a city-wide clean up of various parking structures, parking lots, and other public lands, and whatever chemicals were being used produced very noticeable fumes that gave people headaches and lingered in the air, sometimes faintly, often overpoweringly, until winter. Looking back it’s kind of a perfect metaphoric device for how those times felt, some unexplained and potentially hazardous thing hangs wordlessly in the air, it affects everyone and no there’s information given on how to get through it or even talk about it.

You can hear those decades of grief and perspective in “Embankment,” a song that also reminds us how much Thomas has honed his craft along the way. Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Embankment”
02 “Coughed Up A Cufflink”
03 “Electric Guitar Left Out In The Street”
04 “Season Of Carelessness”
05 “Hours”
06 “New Forgetting”
07 “Wasn’t”

Window In The Rhythm is out 10/4 on Polyvinyl. Pre-order it here.