If Introduction, Presence was a bold, bright tribute to the classic era of new wave, A Way Forward is often a blearier album, exhuming more primitive drum machines and synths and combining them with trippier ambience without entirely foregoing the danceability and muscularity the band displayed on their debut. This time, he was looking further back - to Kraftwerk and krautrock and foundational synthesizer music. But at the same time, several years ago, Devaney began working on material that would become a different family of songs. Those developed as NOL were playing shows around NYC, cutting their teeth and building up their name.

Introduction, Presence was one of those albums that felt like a collection of early singles, an imagined greatest hits - banger after banger, a consistent aesthetic but with each song trying on a different idea.

That album, A Way Forward, was actually germinating for quite some time. Also on the other side of the pandemic, they have another new album already, arriving just in time for fans who have found NOL in the last year and hadn’t been able to catch them on the road yet. And on the other side of the pandemic, the Brooklyn trio - also featuring Devaney’s wife Aidan Noell on synths, and bassist Michael Sui-Poi - have become noticeably bigger, selling out shows around the country. People found Introduction, Presence anyway. Little of the last year and a half has, and you can only imagine the amount of up-and-coming bands who got cut off at the knees, releasing albums that represented years of hard work and incremental growth and then not being able to tour behind them.īizarrely, things still worked out pretty well for Nation Of Language. Of course, that didn’t go as planned either. This wasn’t the original plan: It had been slated for April, and then pushed back thinking they might still get to play a release show in May. Last year, Nation Of Language released their debut album Introduction, Presence in the middle of May - just in time for frontman Ian Devaney’s thirtieth birthday, and right around the time we were starting to creep out of lockdown and see each other again.

Send it on song