What is the price we pay for joy, and is it worth it? The thread of this question runs taut through The Fourth Wall’s upcoming collection, Return Forever (slated for release in 2024 on DevilDuck Records), a fever dream of a record that unearths unresolved complexities of the immigrant experience in nine chapters. Throughout the album, songwriter Stephen Agustin circles a fire that feels so bright and yet so unknowable; there are not many answers to be found, only a disruption, the emergence of a world seen with new eyes.
Return Forever was first inspired by a moment in Agustin’s family history in which he learned that a close relative had left behind a young daughter when she moved to the United States, turning away from her past life and creating one anew. Shocked though he was, Agustin soon became fascinated with the idea of the “poetry of forgetfulness.”
“There was almost a way in which the impulse to revise or destroy history became a condition for achieving this joyous state,” he says. It was a theme he would begin to see over and over again: in the way he saw immigrant families assimilating into the United States, or in the way he saw his own parents—who were from Korea and the Philippines—harbor so little resentment towards America despite the traumatic history of war and colonization it has with those countries. Lush, cinematic, and bold, The Fourth Wall paints the paradox of the exchange of joy for memory so perfectly. Driven by Agustin’s mastery of electric guitar soundscapes and the distorted, impassioned harmonies he shares with the band’s newest member Kendall Sallay, Return Forever is a journey that somehow captures the unfathomable. It is hair-raising, powerful, and gorgeous.
Today Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the video for the album’s single “Never A Part,” in which Agustin first begins to explore the loss that comes with erasure. Lyrically, the song is inspired by a beautiful, frustrated conversation he imagines between his grandmother and her grandson. This feeling of intensity, drama, and irreconcilable distance transpires in a sound that fuses indie pop and alt. rock with a moody and swelling sound that captures the emotion in the lyrics. The band crafts a visual representation of this in the video, which features Agustin in a photo shoot that comes to a surprising ending just when we enter the final drum breakdown to bring the song to a grand conclusion.
Stephen Agustin describes the inspiration behind the song:
Never A Part was inspired by a visit from my grandmother. During the writing of this upcoming record, I was trying to learn more about my family’s history. It took me an embarrassingly long time to become curious about the story behind my family and how they ended up in the States. The discovery of some of the past traumas they endured prompted me to also question why the silences surrounding their history became the status quo.
During her visit, my grandmother and I exchanged a few obligatory phrases in each other’s language (I am as unfamiliar with her language as she is with mine) and the absence of knowledge about each other was palpable. It brought to the surface this question about what the driving force behind the family relationship is and how affection is maintained even in the absence of a means of communicating with each other. Do the gaps preserve and maintain the love even?
Never A Part is sort of a fictionalized monologue by a person who has fled their place of origin to have children in a new world, knowing that they would acquire new and unfamiliar cultural norms. The logic of exchange is at work here. “For my grandchildren’s prosperity, I give up the means to know them (and for them to know me).” This gift of self-erasure for the sake of a loved one is at the heart of the song.
With the music video, we wanted to play with the difficulty of representation more broadly. In the video, memory is created then destroyed in one continuous shot. The people in the video act as if they are fulfilling a duty to create images of a certain kind and they comply just as obediently to the order of destroying images that don’t meet the criteria. The video attempts to bring forth the theme of self-erasure in the song.
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