Downhaul
How to Begin
SELF AWARE
How to Begin isn’t just the title of the new album from Downhaul—it’s a lyrical motif that first hits about three quarters of the way through its first single, “Sinker.” Over jangling guitars and Chandler Brooks’ buoyant bass, bandleader Gordon Phillips searches for meaning but seems to find peace in its absence, offering the title-drop balm, “It’s hard to know how to begin.” The reassurance fades by the end of the album, though, with “Sleep in the Sunroom” mourning growing older with a vengeance. As Robbie Ludvigsen’s guitar climbs alongside the steady pace from Andrew Seymour’s drums, Phillips’ voice soars to dizzying heights. He decries the hypocrisy of self-care axioms and careens between images of vacations and broken bones with a strangled cry: “I don’t know how to begin.”
Not knowing where to start is a compelling feeling, and in a way, it’s a funny choice to hang an album that sounds this confident on it. Since Downhaul formed in 2016, the Richmond-via-Carolina band has innovated and refined a mad-science mix of alt-country, emo, and post-rock sounds that spring up in turns. The twinkling riffs on 2019’s Before You Fall Asleep LP and Tornado Season EP gave way to atmospheric lap steel on 2021’s PROOF, which evolved into the experimental four-song cycle and ambient storm recordings of 2023’s Squall. How to Begin is in conversation with these earlier releases, but it peels back their layers, revealing the raw nerve endings underneath in a full-force reckoning with mortality and metamorphosis.
Part of that conversation happens through Phillips’ lyrics, which call back to frequent Downhaul touchstones: weather events, bodies of water, and other forces of nature beyond our control. These have been part of the band’s mythos for a long time, but on How to Begin, there’s a new immediacy to the threats they can offer: a body like a waterfall takes a “swan dive into the carpet” on “Blue Flame,” relationships rot at the root on “Y.C.B.T.T.,” a downed tree falls inches from a house on “Branch.” Alongside these callbacks is a real-time consideration of how grueling and sacrificial making art can feel. Phillips used a metric called the “campfire test” (“a song works if it’s good when you play it alone on acoustic guitar”) to write How to Begin, and the upbeat sound feels dogged, dissonant. It makes the commentary all the sharper: When it comes to the looming threat of impermanence, what else can we do but grin and bear it?
How to Begin grins and bears, but in answer to that question, it also makes room for a new era. There’s more space on these songs than on previous Downhaul releases, more vocals from Seymour and Brooks, a fresh pace that honors the vitality of the band’s live shows. There’s room for uncertainty, too—especially on “Solstice,” which presses questions about how much room there is in someone else’s heart, then turns inward. Growing means shedding previous versions of yourself, and, as “Branch” points out, sometimes that means your old dreams don’t fit anymore. But it does allow you to dream something new—to find a way to begin again.
