Caleb Nichols – Car Park

Queer poet and singer/songwriter Caleb Nichols has released the video for “Car Park”, third single off his upcoming album, Stone Age Is Back, to be released via Royal Oakie Records on October 3, 2025.

Like a PhD dissertation in contemporary indie rock and alt folk, Caleb Nichols’ third solo album Stone Age Is Back is a fascinating and urgent addition to his growing catalog of music and poetry.

The new LP is a meditation on grief— but not in the way you’d expect. Across 13 dynamic and lovingly produced indie gems, Nichols interrogates the grief, guilt, complicity, joy, anger, fear, and dissociative feelings that come along with living through a mass extinction event. Stone Age Is Back isn’t really a political album, or an album even explicitly about the climate crisis— rather, it’s an album that explores what it means to be living and dying right now, in this moment of extraordinary change.

Produced by Nichols (Kill Rock Stars, Port O’Brien), and mixed and engineered by Jay Pellicci (the Dodos, Deerhoof), Stone Age Is Back is sonically immaculate even while the performances themselves exude an immediacy that might remind you of early Modest Mouse, or, more contemporarily, UK punks the Tubs. Recorded in Oakland, the band adhered to a ‘first take-best take’ rule, and moved quickly, recording the entire album in just five days.

“Car Park” is one of the most straightforward tracks on the album, and finds Nichols harkening back to his early 2000’s indie roots (he was the bassist of proto-stomp-and-holler band Port O’Brien). Floating through the ethereal quality of the first verse, we’re shocked back to our senses with the gravity drop of the third verse: an Arcade Fire-esque moment that showcases Nichols’ ability to transcend his most-often-cited influence (the double-tracked, ghostly vocals of former labelmate Elliott Smith) as he belts out an anthemic chorus of a verse: “Saw you / In the car park / trapped in the sameness of life / saw you / in a memory / and I felt the spirit / take flight.” It’s a memorable moment from an album full to the brim with them.