They have a saying in sports: Father Time is undefeated. In other words, time catches up to everyone, even the most gifted athletes. A great basketball player, for example, may vanquish his opponents on the court for many years. Inevitably, though, he will get older, his body will deteriorate and his athletic ability will decline. He won’t run as fast or jump as high. It happens to everyone, LeBron James notwithstanding. It’s happening to him, too—he has simply eluded Father Time for longer than most. This rule is not as applicable in the world of music, where the quantity and quality of the output is not dependent upon physical ability. Still, rock ‘n’ roll is a young man’s game, and most artists do the bulk of their best work in their teens, 20s and 30s. Later in life, the songs tend to come more slowly. The balance of good ones and bad ones usually starts to slide in the wrong direction, too.
That has not been the case for Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws. Sure, the New York City band goes four years between albums now (as opposed to the two- or three-year gaps they were working through back in the late 1990s and 2000s). But three decades after the release of their first 7” single, Caws continues to crank out buzzy, buoyant pop-rock songs with remarkable consistency. That’s the word for Nada Surf: Consistent. Not transcendent, except for maybe on 2002’s Let Go. Never terrible, certainly. And don’t call ‘em a one-hit wonder or even underrated, though both may be true.
Indeed, this might be the most consistent band in indie rock, and they prove it again on Moon Mirror, their first album since 2020’s Never Not Together and their first for New West Records. At 11 tracks and a 44 minute-runtime, it’s packed efficiently with all the things we expect from Nada Surf: propulsive rhythms, jangling guitars, gleaming melodies delivered via Caws’ lithe tenor. Lyrically, he sounds like a man who, at age 57, has figured out that you never really figure things out in life—you just wander and wonder and hope. “I’m always changing. You’re getting burned. What kind of me has the next turn?” he sings in “The One You Want,” the album’s string-laden centerpiece.
That kind of uncertainty pops up regularly throughout Moon Mirror, an album with a strummy, reflective title track that doubles as a plainspoken search for meaning and connection. Later, on “Losing,” Caws sounds like a man who has lost not only love and time, but his sense of self. “I am drifting. I’m a cloud. I am bending. I am bowed,” he sings as guitars squall in the background. “I’m just static in the air dissipating and I don’t care.” The undercurrent of sadness that courses through one of the prettiest songs on the album is striking—and so very Nada Surf.
Elsewhere, Caws sings of feeling more adaptable (“New Propeller”), less guarded (“Second Skin”), more present and focused (“In Front Of Me Now”) and freer to be himself (“Intel and Dreams”). Along the way, he and his band mates—bassist Daniel Lorca, drummer Ira Elliot and keyboardist Louie Lino—find 11 different-but-the-same ways to make ultra-catchy songs by expertly fusing the muscle of an electrified rock band with a seemingly endless supply of stirring moments and sparkling sounds. For evidence, fire up “Open Seas”—four minutes of a seesawing guitar riff that sounds like it’d take off your fingertips, plus melodic musings about following a crooked path, feeling like a fraud and, eventually, learning to let it all go while you still can. “Time,” Caws sings as the song peaks, “is on our heels, is on our heels, is on our heels.” He’s right, of course. But in Nada Surf, time seems to have met its match—at least for a little while longer.
