Album Review: Moon Mirror by Nada Surf

They have a saying in sports: Father Time is undefeated. In other words, time catches up to everyone, even the most gifted athletes. A great basketball player, for example, may vanquish his opponents on the court for many years.

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Imbued with that classic rock spirit, their 10th album shows they’re not afraid to keep evolving their sound You may not know the name, but if you had even the slightest bit of interest in music during the mid-’90s, you’ll have heard Nada Surf‘s biggest (and to date, only) hit. Popular was all over MTV in 1996, a snarling, spoken word anthem, whose lyrics were almost entirely taken from a teen advice book, Penny’s Guide To Teenage Charm And Popularity. Popular turned out to be something of an outlier for Matthew Caws’ band, with the New Yorkers spending the last 30 years or so perfecting a brand of power-pop that fans of the likes of Teenage Fanclub or Big Star would fall hard for.

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Nada Surf are always the indie-rock grown-ups in the room—the band who know exactly who they are and what they’re doing. Their excellent new Moon Mirror has all the tropes that go into a Nada Surf album: exquisite guitar chimes polished until they gleam, melodies that kick in and stick, songcraft in the finest Big Star/Kinks/Spoon tradition. Matthew Caws sings his impeccably witty tunes about being in love (with a person, with a song, with a feeling) and how it changes over time, without ever settling for the trite line or the trite riff. But Moon Mirror is Nada Surf’s most musically and emotionally passionate album in years, on the level of gems like Let Go, This Weight Is A Gift, and The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy..

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The last time we heard from Nada Surf, on 2020’s Never Not Together, the long-running power pop band was in a reflective mood. Some of the lyrics had a philosophical bent, and one track, “Something I Should Do”, featured frontman Matthew Caws going on extended spoken word rants, hammering home the point, “Empathy is good / A lack of empathy is bad / Holy math says we’re never not together.” On that record, Nada Surf sounded energized. In retrospect, though, as it was released near the end of the Trump Administration, the lyrical viewpoint sounds more like a plea for people to calm down and let sanity reassert itself.

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Nada Surf’s latest, Moon Mirror, is not only their first release for Americana-dominated New West Records, but it also marks a new musical step forward for the long-running indie pop band. Despite now sharing a roster with bands like 49 Winchester and John Hiatt, don’t expect an album full of banjos and mandolins, but it does find the band pulling off an impressive exorcism of emotions, delving into some heavy themes touching on loss, grief, doubt, and uncertainty throughout the record. Lyrically, the band has always boasted a knack for writing smart lyrics with emotional heft, wrapped in expansive instrumentation, but Moon Mirror seems to be one of their most introspective exercises yet..

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