Trying Not to Have a Thought isn’t just the first Algernon Cadwallader album since 2011’s Parrot Flies. It’s also the first with their original lineup—vocalist-bassist Peter Helmis, guitarists Joe Reinhart and Colin Mahony, and drummer Nick Tazza—since Algernon’s seminal 2008 debut, Some Kind of Cadwallader. Shortly after that album was recorded—and long before it was heralded as a lodestar for the 2010s “emo revival”—Tazza and Mahony departed the band. Despite their looming influence on the aforementioned “revival,” Algernon broke up in 2012 following the release of Parrot Flies and remained stubbornly deceased until their fiendishly anticipated resurrection in 2022.
Trying Not to Have a Thought is simultaneously the most considered and off-the-cuff Algernon Cadwallader album yet. The 11-song classic was written across two rural retreats on either side of the country, first in Snoqualmie, Washington (mythically known as Twin Peaks), and then in the Poconos in the woods of Pennsylvania. After an initial session at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, the collection was largely recorded and self-produced at Reinhart’s Headroom Studios in Philadelphia. Whereas some reunion records sound stilted and forced, this record sounds resplendently natural: the production warm and lively, the musicianship congenial yet exacting, and the hooks effortlessly sticky. Fans who've been listening to Algernon since their 2005 formation will be fondly reminded of the band’s familiar ring, but the album feels distinctly uncoupled from any of the ephemeral trends that Algernon were previously filed under. Their musical touchpoints remain unchanged—“Joan of Arc and Pavement in a blender is where we end up sitting,” Reinhart says with a smile—but the band sounds more comfortably singular than ever before.