Philly Band Timelost Share How They Crafted Debut Album’s Immersive ‘Noisegaze’

The Philadelphia-area band Timelost blend the thickness of grunge and shoegaze with the more massive, “epic” qualities of post-rock and post-metal and thereby powerfully amplify the shared intense personal desperation to a stunning degree. Their debut album Don’t Remember Me For This released October 25 via Golden Antenna and walks through something like the sonic equivalent of surveying what’s been left behind after a massive storm that, in this case, constitutes the upending interruptions marking some of our closest relationships. The band have found a stunningly fresh, musically fascinating way to explore the extremes of these personal but relatable situations.

“The album is about emotional pain, self-awareness, doubt, depression, and ultimately melting down to nothing,” drummer Grzesiek Czapla — who’s also in the black metal band Woe — explains. “This was the natural lyrical content of the album that was pieced together by us individually as we wrote the music together. It’s hard to describe the music of the album, and while doing so, even harder to not sound pretentious about it. Truthfully, we wrote these songs without a particular style in mind and what ended up coming out was a shoegaze tinged grunge album that lives in a sad world of minor chords, catchy as fuck leads, and Shane singing for the first time ever at the shameful age of 30.”

As vocalist Shane Handal (who’s also in the band Set and Setting) adds: “We always were shooting for originality and uniqueness.”

The band feel like they’ve used this foundation to springboard into a captivating creation. The songs on Don’t Remember Me For This legitimately feel like they mark the musicians’ personal journey through deeply emotionally reverberating loss, and the honesty feels ready for listeners to latch onto — while at the same time having opened up those new horizons for the band sound-wise.

Fittingly considering the dynamics, Czapla notes that his idea of the best listening experience for Timelost’s debut is: “Vinyl, loud, crushing J after J, killer hang zone, grilling with the crüe. But also, during the solitude found on a long and lonely morning commute.”

No genre descriptor would likely ever totally do them justice, but the band do circulate around the kinds of ideas exemplified in other bands like Cease Upon The Capital on their 2007 self-titled LP and Holy Fawn on their more recent release, 2019’s Death Spells. Holy Fawn use a tongue-in-cheek description that works well here too — they call their music “loud heavy pretty noises.”

Timelost put their own album together through a feat of long-distance writing. “We wrote the entire record through iPhone memo recording and Shane’s GarageBand expertise,” Czapla explains. “It was a crude process that made us work on songs individually and talk on the phone for 10 hours a week for a whole year. It was fulfilling and annoying at the same time. That actually was the best part and sometimes, we’d finish a song with a dozen of files shared over just a week.” 

The technology-facilitated, organic process let the respective creators’ diligence shine — some of the songs (like the title track) had as many as thirteen different iterations before the version that we hear on the finished record. “It’s cool though because we got to spend as much time as we wanted on a song and came back to it as we had a new idea without any obstacles or scheduling conflicts,” Czapla shares.

Why stop when your imagination’s the limit? “There were times when writing the album that we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do sonically before the riffs were even written — usually it was a direct result of wanting to do something different than the last couple of songs,” Handal explains. “And then sometimes the songs had no preconceived ideas and were just written.”

“We’re just trying to write the best songs we possibly can, and exploring new territories or pushing the overall sound of the song to be the best possible is always in mind,” he adds.

You get a chance to explore this journey now that they’ve released their creation for the world.

Check it out:

Photo via Matt Valler