A.C. Newman pulls the drums back on Great Princess Story until they’re basically a rumour, then lets a thin synth line carry the weight. It’s a strange way to open a New Pornographers record. The tempo feels like it’s waiting for something that never shows up. You keep listening for the lift, the old rush, the moment where the band used to lean in and flood the chorus. It doesn’t come.
That restraint hangs around. The guitars arrive clipped and polite, chords held a second too long before they drop out. Charley Drayton plays like he’s tracing the outline of a beat instead of filling it in, soft snare taps, hi-hats closing early, rhythms dragging just behind where you expect them. Even when the melodies want to move, the rhythm section keeps a hand on the shoulder.
Pure Sticker Shock leans into the feeling. A looping synth arpeggio does most of the work, repeating with just enough variation to stay alive. The bass sits low and steady, barely shifting, while Newman sings above it in a voice that sounds less like a performance than a thought forming mid-phrase. He drops a lyric, half shrug, half confession, and the band doesn’t flinch. No swell, no accent, nothing to frame it. It just goes by. After a while you start paying more attention to the space between the instruments than the instruments themselves.
Then Votive breaks the pattern. A mandolin cuts in at the start, sharp and percussive, not there for decoration. It pokes at the rhythm, pushes against the synths drifting in like a wash from somewhere else entirely. When the full band finally steps in, electric guitar tight and insistent, drums actually driving, it feels almost wrong at first. Like someone turned on a light in the wrong room. For a minute you remember how this band used to move, how they used to muscle a song into the air. Then it slips away again.
That push and pull runs through the record. Calligraphy hangs on a loose strum, the guitar never quite locking into a groove, the rhythm section suggesting motion without committing to it. Neko Case and Kathryn Calder come in high, voices blending but kept at a distance in the mix, like they’re hovering just outside the song. The harmonies don’t land so much as drift past, and the track stays slightly untethered. Intentional, sure. Still a little maddening. You want something to grab.
Newman’s writing sits closer to the surface this time. Less of the old wordplay as camouflage, more direct images, though he still steps sideways when it suits him. A line about watching a film after a paywall drops. Buying something you won’t have time to use. Little details that hit harder than the bigger statements he keeps refusing to make. His voice doesn’t push for emphasis. It just drops the line and keeps walking.
Bonus Mai Tais slows everything down even further, and it’s the one time the stillness feels fully earned. The chord progression barely moves, a gentle cycle returning to itself, while a single melodic thread stretches across the track. The arrangement stays spare, a few keys, a soft bass line, brushes instead of hits. Newman sings about sitting with someone facing the end, and the details are brutal because they’re so ordinary, the kind of thing you don’t realize you’ll remember until it’s all you can remember. Case and Calder move in close here, their harmonies tucked right behind the lead, almost touching it. The song doesn’t build. It doesn’t reach. It just stays put and lets the weight settle.
Elsewhere the band keeps doing this thing where it hints at a turn, then refuses it. A horn line appears late in one track, suggests a bigger arrangement, then vanishes before it can change the temperature. A guitar figure sets up a pivot that never comes. You start to feel the habit forming in real time, songs circling their centre and pulling away at the last second. Sometimes it reads as discipline. Sometimes it reads as hesitation.
The title track stretches out toward the end and finally allows something close to lift. A repeating figure builds, layers stacking slowly, a glissando rising over the top, not quite release but closer than anything before it. Even there, the band keeps it controlled. The sound expands, but the rhythm never breaks free. Forward motion isn’t the point, or maybe it’s the thing they’ve decided not to give you.
There’s a version of this album that commits harder, strips things back even further, leans fully into the stillness it keeps circling. This one hovers in between. Flashes of the old energy, then long stretches where it gets deliberately held back. It asks for patience, and sometimes it feels like it’s testing how much you’ve got.
But it sticks. Not the choruses, not the big hooks. The details. A delayed snare hit. A harmony slipping in and out without warning. A melody that refuses to resolve. You don’t leave humming anything. You leave remembering textures, little decisions, the shape of the empty space.
The Former Site Of is out now via Merge Records.
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