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09/12/2025

Algernon Cadwallader

Trying Not to Have a Thought

Thursday, August 7, 2025 - 12:09

submitted by

Thomas

Saddle Creek

Trying Not to Have a Thought isn’t just the first Algernon Cadwallader album since 2011’s Parrot Flies. It’s also the first with their original lineup—vocalist-bassist Peter Helmis, guitarists Joe Reinhart and Colin Mahony, and drummer Nick Tazza—since Algernon’s seminal 2008 debut, Some Kind of Cadwallader. Shortly after that album was recorded—and long before it was heralded as a lodestar for the 2010s “emo revival”—Tazza and Mahony departed the band. Despite their looming influence on the aforementioned “revival,” Algernon broke up in 2012 following the release of Parrot Flies and remained stubbornly deceased until their fiendishly anticipated resurrection in 2022.

“I almost see it as fate that it boiled us down to this core, our original form,” Helmis says. “There’s a certain magic to that that couldn’t really be replicated.”

There was no expectation that the reunion tour would precipitate new music. However, as the band began rehearsing their classic songs, new ideas started leaking out in the form of off-the-cuff jams, and the seeds of Trying Not to Have a Thought began to germinate. Reinhart was pleasantly surprised that, even after 17 years of not playing together under the Algernon umbrella, the foursome’s foundational musical chemistry was still surging.

“I’m kind of hearing in my head what this person’s already doing,” Reinhart says, recalling the intuitive flow of those improvisational jams.

Trying Not to Have a Thought is simultaneously the most considered and off-the-cuff Algernon Cadwallader album yet. The 11-song classic was written across two rural retreats on either side of the country, first in Snoqualmie, Washington (mythically known as Twin Peaks), and then in the Poconos in the woods of Pennsylvania. After an initial session at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, the collection was largely recorded and self-produced at Reinhart’s Headroom Studios in Philadelphia. Whereas some reunion records sound stilted and forced, this record sounds resplendently natural: the production warm and lively, the musicianship congenial yet exacting, and the hooks effortlessly sticky. Fans who've been listening to Algernon since their 2005 formation will be fondly reminded of the band’s familiar ring, but the album feels distinctly uncoupled from any of the ephemeral trends that Algernon were previously filed under. Their musical touchpoints remain unchanged—“Joan of Arc and Pavement in a blender is where we end up sitting,” Reinhart says with a smile—but the band sounds more comfortably singular than ever before.

Algernon Cadwallader are certainly cognizant of their cult legacy, a status that's transformed their fanbase into a unique convergence of graying punk lifers and fresh-faced teens who first discovered “midwest emo” on TikTok. Given the long gap between albums and the critical acclaim they’ve garnered in that time, it would’ve been understandable for the guys to feel pressured to live up to their own standards while making this new record. Thankfully, the opposite was the case.

“If anything, I think [our legacy] made us feel like we had more freedom to be ourselves and let it come out naturally,“ Helmis says. Reinhart doubles down on their creative autonomy: “The only thing we ever try to do is entertain ourselves. Do we like this? Good. No? Let’s try harder.”

Trying Not to Have a Thought differs most from previous Algernon records in its lyrical content. On their first two albums, Helmis avoided heart-on-sleeve emo tropes by penning prose that was ambiguous and out there. For this batch of songs, Helmis felt compelled to be a little more thematically explicit, pointedly exploring the tension between the necessity of self-improvement and the urgency of the external. Specifically, the doom-scrollable apocalypse that is modern American life. Album opener “Hawk” is a brisk, poignant meditation on grief that weighs the ache of loss against the bittersweet memories that keep the deceased ever present. “Revelation 420” and “Million Dollars” are scorching political diatribes that excoriate capitalism’s failures and venerate protest. “Attn MOVE” is a historical reminder of the MOVE 9, a group of Black radical activists whose Philadelphia homes were notoriously bombed by police in 1985—a block of houses that's located right between Reinhart’s current house and Headroom Studios.

With Trying Not to Have a Thought, Algernon Cadwallader juggle intrinsic musical connection and shrewd lyrical intention with remarkable poise. The album’s title perfectly captures that dual approach: the effort to resist being mentally bogged down by the bottomless list of daily atrocities, and the band’s decision to let their unspoken connection guide this rejuvenated take on their classic sound. “This is just what comes out of us when these four people get in a room,” Helmis says. And this record is exactly that: an Algernon Cadwallader album that's leisurely, intensely, tremendously their own.

Trying Not to Have a Thought tracklist: