Vinyl - Caleb Nichols - Stone Age Is Back

Stone Age Is Back, the new LP from Caleb Nichols, is a meditation on grief— but not in the way you’d expect. Across 13 dynamic and lovingly produced indie rock 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 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, mixed and engineered by Jay Pellicci, Stone Age Is Back album 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. Nichols says:

“When I was starting to think about recording Stone Age I knew I wanted to do the record as simply as possible. I’d fallen in love with the UK DIY scene and bands like the Tubs, Trust Fund, Big Joannie, Adults, Witching Waves, and so many others were making such good noise in such a simple way. I thought, “I want to do that” and so I decided we’d keep the studio sessions very live, overdub minimally, and try and go for a first take/best take approach. Like, what you see is what you get. So I also started listening to early REM, because those records sound like that. And Neil Young, because of the simple fury of Crazy Horse, but also because I knew I wanted to keep making something approaching indie folk, like I had been doing, and Neil felt like the right feeling for that.”

Title track ‘Stone Age Is Back’ finds Nichols at his most Young-esque, with acoustic guitars and drums that invoke 70’s Young, and solos that might bring to mind Rust Never Sleeps. Lyrically, this is the song that most directly tackles climate crisis, and finds Nichols delivering an angry screed against the billionaire class: “No shade, no shame / take all the money and / build a bunker / fill it with your billions,” he snarls in a triple-tracked vocal that brings to mind Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock. “Woulda, should, shoulda, could / coulda done almost anything / you lied, you lied, you lied / you lied about everything / and we will pay the price / of being so polite”. Especially poignant after the firestorm that ravaged LA in early 2025, this track cuts to the quick and takes no prisoners.

Nichols, who finished a PhD in Creative Writing at Bangor University in Wales, has been living in the UK on and off since 2022. The album’s themes reflect this movement between Nichols’ native California and the small North Wales community he’s also called home. Sound recordings from both places haunt the record: a snippet of trad music recorded at a Welsh pub, rain and windchimes captured on the California coast, mysterious chanting in an ancient Wesh church mixed with California birdsong and traffic sounds: all these elements dot the sonic landscape of Stone Age Is Back, imbuing with a surreal sense of both places.

Nichols shares: “I wanted Stone Age to feel immediate and from both the past and the future, because that’s how I’m thinking about time: we’re already dead, we’re still living, we haven’t even been born. I wrote the album after completing the first real draft of my PhD dissertation, which was the culmination of nearly three years of very abstract intellectual labor. I was reading Timothy Morton’s books, particularly Dark Ecology, Pauline Oliveros’ Quantum Listening (which I serendipitously found at the Liverpool Tate), Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence, and so much poetry: Denise Riley, CAConrad, Sean Bonney, Bernadette Mayer. I was traveling a lot— playing shows but also just traveling on trains, on my own, to just see things. That combination was quite good for creativity, and I think after all the formality of PhD-land, half of me was ready to make something just absolutely stupid (like the song “Awooo!”) but the other half of me needed a repository for some of these nebulous feelings I was having about deep time, hyperobjects, climate crisis, and complicity. Most of this went into poems, but I suppose the rest overflowed into this album. Some things are better said in a song. Some things feel better on a page. Some things are both. Maybe that’s my dissertation.”

And the Welsh landscape is very present on this record as well. In ‘Hag Stone’ Nichols sings of a ‘distant light’ he has to find: like a lighthouse, perhaps, on the North Wales coast. The light though, isn’t constant: it’s on the blink, and can only be seen through some sort of intermediary— an unobtainable object, only seeable through magic: a hag stone, like one that might be found on an Anglesey beach. “I see / who I / am when / I am / with you,” Nichols goes on, invoking the Velvet Underground’s ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ against a sonic backdrop that owes a debt to Yo La Tengo; emphasising that we only ever truly see ourselves in the strange, distorted mirrors of the people we surround ourselves with.

In ‘Dark Age’, the light almost completely goes out, and Nichols is at his most vulnerable, singing over a shimmering soundscape of brushed cymbals and dripping feedback: “is this permanence / the weight of absence? I’ve been / struggling / in so-called silence.” The song itself is a classical fugue figure, driving up and down the fretboard and reminiscent of something lost from the Unknown Mortal Orchestra catalog. “It hits / different/ the shape of what / I thought I wanted,” he sings, over a descending classical guitar line, bass arpeggios, and tremolo feedback.

Album highlight ‘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 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.

The influence of Nichols’ work as a poet and researcher are evident on the album as well, in songs like ‘Awooo!’ which sounds like a mashup of the Rolling Stones, Dandy Warhols, Blur, White Stripes, and the Pixies. Despite Nichols claim that’s it’s the ‘dumbest’ song on the album, it's actually a lyrical meditation on what happens to us when we die, using ideas from ecophilosopher Timothy Morton’s book Dark Ecology to ask the question: why don’t we know what happens to us and our loved ones and everyone else on the other side? “Down, down, and down it goes, oh but no one knows / where do the pieces go?/ I guess we’ll never know” he sings.

One part PhD dissertation, one part urgent, immediate indie rock, Stone Age Is Back, Nichols’ third solo album, is an excellent addition to his growing catalog of music and poetry.