ACTIVITY
A THOUSAND YEARS IN ANOTHER WAY (WESTERN VINYL)
"Evil is very real and having its way, and love is also real and hasn't lost yet." That's how Activity's Travis Johnson described their third album, A Thousand Years In Another Way.
A friend had asked why these songs seemed to capture the strange, heavy feeling of being alive right now better than anything else_and that was his answer.
The album doesn't try to explain this time we're living in; it simply feels like it. It's a mix of violence, alienation, and tenderness_reflecting the surreal, dreamlike (or nightmarish) rhythm of daily life.
Across ten songs, Activity blends experimental rock, electronics, and found sounds with a sense of paranoia, flickers of hope, and a warped reality.
Working with producer Jeff Berner (of Psychic TV), the band manipulated sounds and played with room acoustics to create a feeling that's disorienting_like the air is thick and the walls are listening.
Coming out of a period of uncertainty, the Brooklyn-based quartet_Travis Johnson, Jess Rees, Bri DiGioia, and Steven Levine_pieced the album together from fragments: clipped samples, looping guitar lines, ghostly melodies.
Rees, DiGioia, and Johnson share vocal and writing duties, shaping a record that feels both deeply personal and strangely alien.
There's a constant sense that things could shift or fall apart at any second_nothing stays one thing for long.
A Thousand Years In Another Way might not offer answers, but it captures the feeling of right now better than most.
And maybe, it sounds a bit like your world too.