Let’s just get straight to it, Caleb Nichols is not playing around. His third solo album, Stone Age Is Back, is a full-on, fascinating deep-dive into what it actually feels like to be alive right now, in this moment when everything feels like it’s accelerating toward a cliff edge. Forget your standard breakup albums because this is a meditation on existential grief that comes along with living through a mass extinction event. It’s heavy, brilliant, and it’s an essential addition to his growing catalog of music and poetry. Coming at us on Royal Oakie, this new LP isn’t explicitly a political album, and it’s not just hammering you over the head with climate crisis talking points. Instead, it’s far more subtle and powerful. Nichols is exploring the messy, complicated feelings that flood into your everyday life when you know the world is fundamentally changing. We’re talking about interrogating the grief, guilt,complicity, and the sheer fear, but also finding space for the joy, anger, and the dissociative feeling of watching the world burn while you still have to buy groceries. This album is a full emotional syllabus for modern living.
You can tell immediately that Nichols brings a different kind of brainpower to his music. This album reads like contemporary indie rock and alt folk. He takes his intellectual depth and translates it directly into sound. The influences are wild, from the landscapes of North Wales, where he wrote the songs, to the complex poetry and theory he was reading, and the raw energy of UK DIY bands. The result is a well-curated but totally wild ride through an aesthetic of queer ecology, rustic punk, existential folk, and moments of pure, frenetic indie pop. The sound itself is what really cements the strength of this material. It was produced by Nichols himself and mixed and engineered by the incredible Jay Pellicci, who has also worked with people like The Dodos and Deerhoof. The album is sonically excellent because it sounds huge, clear, and perfectly balanced. But here’s the trick, the performances themselves ooze this unbelievable sense of closeness. They recorded the entire thing in Oakland in just five days, sticking to a strict ‘first take-best take’ rule. That combination, perfect sound quality mixed with raw, live energy, makes it feel so urgent. It has that glorious, rough-around-the-edges immediacy that might remind you of so many artists and bands at once.
Across these 13 dynamic, lovingly produced gems, Nichols blends genres with such precision and finesse. You get moments of straight-up, acoustic-driven existential folk where the guitar work is thoughtful and layered, reflecting the quiet meditation on loss. Then, out of nowhere, you get these explosive blasts of fierce indie pop that capture the anger and the anxiety. It’s an album that demands attention because you never know what’s coming next. A sample of voices recorded in a 600-year-old church, a spoken word section, a dip into experimental jazz, or a surprise flash of genuine Neil Young-esque guitar shredding. It’s all over the place, and that scattered approach perfectly mirrors the scattered mental state of living through extraordinary change. The band that backs Nichols on this record plays with tremendous precision. They manage to be technically proficient while completely maintaining that “first take” adrenaline. The drumming is intense, energetic, and constantly driving the momentum, pushing the songs through their complex emotional shifts. The basslines are warm and grounding, providing the necessary low-end anchor when the guitars are spiraling into anxiety or the melodies are stretching out into philosophical space. Every element is there to interrogate the theme, not just to fill space.
This is Nichols’ finest effort yet. It’s his first project since successfully parting ways with Kill Rock Stars, marking a true return to music after completing the massive intellectual undertaking of his PhD. You can hear that sense of release and clarity in the performance. If you are looking for an album that doesn’t shy away from the massive anxieties of our time but still gives you genuinely great indie rock hooks and dynamic, compelling music, then Stone Age Is Back will be right up your alley. It challenges you intellectually, grabs you emotionally, and hits you with the raw power of a great indie record. Go check it out and prepare to think, grieve, and rock out all at once.
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