The first version of small talk. gathered around an iPod Touch in 2013, pressing record and hoping it would hold together long enough to count as a document.
Those songs—released as an early EP called “we’re broke”—never really went away.
Some of them are here again, stretched, reworked, carried forward into a debut LP that arrives more than a decade after the band started.
“what’s gone never left” is out today, April 10. Ten songs, most of them sitting in various states of completion for four or five years, some even longer. The timeline isn’t clean. Recording alone took about three years, done with Sean Tolley at Clarity Recordings—an outside collaborator for the first time, someone who didn’t come from the same immediate circle.
That shift changed things. “The bare bones were there, like the foundation was strong,” the band says, “but we were able to build upon that and make the songs so much stronger.”
Parts were rewritten mid-process—new bridges, swapped choruses, extended outros. The demos and final versions don’t line up neatly. They’re related, but not fixed.
Tolley’s role bleeds into the record in other ways too: bass lines, guitar leads, bits of vocals. Not a guest spot so much as a presence that keeps showing up across the runtime.
The process itself follows a familiar sequence—drums first, then bass, guitars, vocals—but the lineup didn’t stay stable long enough for that order to feel routine. People came and went while the record was still being tracked. Everyone who touched it is still on it.
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
That’s part of the title. “what’s gone never left” sits somewhere between a statement and a correction. The band disappeared for a while—an unannounced, unplanned pause that read like the end from the outside. Behind the scenes, it was more about rebuilding. “A lot of people probably thought we were done,” they say. “But we’re back now stronger than ever. And we never even left.”
The same logic applies to former members. They’re not in the current lineup, but they’re still embedded in the songs. Nothing was re-recorded to tidy that up. The older versions stayed.
“We want everyone to be featured on our first ever album that was part of this band at some point.” The result feels less like a fixed lineup and more like a rotating body of people—past members, friends, anyone orbiting close enough to matter.
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
That sense of accumulation runs through the record’s themes too. It’s a set of songs about trying to move forward while carrying everything with you anyway—trauma that doesn’t fade, friendships that shift or disappear, moments that stick long after they’re supposed to be over. “Everything you think is gone… never really leaves.”
“floral headstones,” released ahead of the album, sits right at the center of that. It deals with loss in a way that doesn’t wait for the event itself—thinking about it before it happens, then living inside it once it does. Holding people close because there’s no clear warning when that window closes. Grief as something that starts early and doesn’t resolve cleanly.
The record as a whole moves through similar territory—self-reflection, attempts at change, the drag of things that don’t let go. It’s the most defined version of the band so far: more aggressive, more melodic, more intricate in the guitar work, but still tied to the same emotional weight they’ve been circling since the beginning.
It took years to get here, partly by necessity. Money, time, lineup shifts, life outside the band—none of it lined up in a way that allowed for a quick release. “If we would have rushed the process… that would have been a disservice to the time we’ve put into writing them.” The songs kept expanding instead, sometimes indefinitely. “You can work on a song forever. It’s never really done, unless you decide for it to be.”
At some point, they decided.
“A huge weight has been lifted, with these songs finally seeing the light of day,” says vocalist and guitarist Victor Andrade. “It’s hard when you feel like they’re just on the backburner because life gets in the way.”
Now they’re out. The band is already talking about what comes next—new ideas, more songs, a timeline that hopefully doesn’t stretch another ten years.
“Here’s hoping the next album doesn’t take as long.”
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
