Hurray for the Riff Raff
The Past Is Still Alive
NONESUCH
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Some things take time. It’s a line repeated verbatim and in sentiment throughout Hurray for the Riff Raff’s newest record, The Past Is Still Alive, an album thoroughly obsessed with time—its healing power, its fleeting nature, its inevitability. In a way, this is unfamiliar territory for songwriter Alynda Segarra. A rail-riding troubadour, a beat poet, an activist, Segarra has always felt like an artist unfixed in time, somehow both a throwback to a different age and wholly modern. In many ways this eighth album represents a significant shift from their most recent work. Segarra will never be a wallflower, but there’s a comfort here, a deep, measured exhalation that’s never been quite so present throughout a varied and intense discography. It’s not contentment exactly, but the weight seems to have lifted ever so slightly, the ghosts of their past a buoy rather than a weight upon their shoulders.
It’s hard to overstate just how piercing a presence Segarra can be as a songwriter. Theirs is an urgency felt acutely, something they harnessed to great success on their last record, a collection whose goal was to not only convey a feeling, but compel you to share in it. 2022’s Life on Earth (along with, to a large degree, HFTRR’s entire discography) was one long, unblinking stare, hard-earned and uninterested in sympathy. That intensity is not gone this time around, but The Past finds Segarra leaning back a bit, directing their message to all that will hear rather than focusing on more specific points of ire. A song like “Buffalo” might reckon with a heady topic like extinction, but it does so with the lightness of one widely held sunset among many, rather than some endless night. “This year tried to kill us, baby / Well good luck trying, you can't catch me,” sings Segarra, a wry smile plastered to their face.
Which isn’t to say that there's not a fair amount of weight to what Segarra wants to explore here. This wouldn’t be a HFTRR record if they weren’t turning their nose up at the state of the world—and at their homeland specifically. “Say goodbye to America, I wanna see it dissolve,” Segarra sings in no uncertain terms on “Colossus of Roads.” Elsewhere it’s the fentanyl crisis, class divide, or even more generally the burning world that get shot through with Segarra’s specific brand of energized exhaustion.
But if things haven’t changed drastically in substance, the shift in presentation is a significant and effective one for Segarra. With the help of a dream team of collaborators, which includes the likes of Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, S.G. Goodman, Anjimile, Conor Oberst, The Mountain Goats’ Matt Douglas, and Megafaun’s Phil and Brad Cook, The Past Is Still Alive might be the most purely beautiful record Segarra’s ever crafted. That might sound facile, but in the case of Hurray for the Riff Raff, it isn’t. Segarra’s talents were evident from their earliest recordings, spinning folky yarns of life on the road with their honeyed vocal lilt. But it’s taken 15 years to bring the past and present to life like they’ve done here.
