Queer poet and singer/songwriter Caleb Nichols releases today the video for “Dark Age”, new 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, which is out October 3rd on US label Royal Oakie (Sugar Candy Mountain, Curling, Sandys) 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.
The track “Dark Age” is a song about grief—of the loss of a loved one, of a relationship, or the loss of certainty in a violently changing world of mass extinction and creeping fascism. “Dark Age”, the moody, sonic twin of previous single “Hag Stone”, is set against a backdrop of rain-wet brushed drums, dripping, feedback-laden guitars, and a subtle, counterpointal bassline. Nichols’ double-tracked vocal is at its most tender, wounded, and vulnerable, as it grapples with the meaning of absence. “Is this/ permanence / the shape of absence?” Nichols sings, without ever answering the question.
The production of “Dark Age” echoes earlier Nichols singles. Helmed by engineer Jay Pellicci, the mix calls to mind the best of the late Richard Swift’s production, embodied by Damien Jurado’s excellent Swift-produced records, with perhaps a more jagged edge. The main guitar riff, a modal scale that roots the song in place, might feel at home in early Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and the bass and drum grooves call to mind Nichols’ frequent interlocutor, Elliott Smith, in his Either/Or era. A quality gem of indie shoegaze— “Dark Age” is a sorrowful mood of a song.
Thoughts Words Action 