Neighborhood Libraries Releases Third Album ‘In Our Wake’

Today, Taylor Swindells, the alias behind Neighborhood Libraries, is excited to release his sensational third album, In Our Wake, via Nettwerk. In Our Wake is a gorgeous and lush exploration of what we bring from our collective past to process—and celebrate—the myriad experiences that make up present-day life. Across the 10 songs that make up the record, Swindells exhibits total control over his emotive ambient sound, resulting in music that’s like gazing upon a reflective pool: Every ripple changes the surface ever so slightly, revealing new details of beauty as the compositions undergo deeply felt shifts in tone and mood.

In Our Wake represents the culmination of Swindells’ impressive career, which started in earnest when he began writing and recording songs as a teenager before forming the Vancouver-based indie rock band The Tourist Company. After the COVID-19 pandemic put the group’s future touring plans on hold for the time being, Swindells relocated to his home studio and transitioned to composing music for film and TV. This career development led to Swindells embracing a love of ambient and neoclassical music that would energize Neighborhood Libraries as a project: “As the world shut down, I didn’t have the brain space for lyrics anymore,” he shares. “So I dove into this world headfirst, and I’ve been immersed in it ever since.” 

Initially, the early Neighborhood Libraries EPs—including the Golden Hours and Postcards for the Backyard series—came naturally between Swindells’ work for A&E and Lifetime, with him focusing more intently on the project as it gained a following. He cites the singular work of neoclassical and ambient artists like Ølafur Arnalds, Heliøs, and Nils Frahm as inspirations for striking the delicate and precise touch of Neighborhood Libraries’ sound. “One thing that always bothered me about playing piano was the brightness of it,” he explains. “I discovered this world where you can treat the piano and do all these different things to add so much character, which was really exciting.”

The artistic “clarity” that his film and TV work provides also guides Swindells’ ethos when it comes to making music as Neighborhood Libraries: The pandemic taught me to think about music as art, and of myself as a craftsman,” he explains. “Neighborhood Libraries feels like sculpting and abstract painting—almost impressionist, in a way, where things are more blurred and less defined.“

In a fitting full-circle moment, Swindells explains that In Our Wake came together in a manner similar to the project’s inaugural releases. “I had some extra time before my next movie started, so I wanted to make something more for my own headspace and myself,” he says. “I’d gotten some new pieces of gear that I wanted to get into the studio and experiment with, in the hopes of working with some new textures.” Drawing from his extensive scoring experience, Swindells worked on In Our Wake with vintage documentaries playing in the background in his studio, finding inspiration from the images on the screen during the month-long creative process. 

Across In Our Wake, Swindells embraces his ambient palette more than ever before, developing the record’s central themes of permanence and change with every sonic brushstroke. “What’s left behind, and what do we leave in our wake?” he asks while discussing the record’s thematic bent. “How we interact with our environment really weighs on my mind a lot. I wanted this music to feel like it was left behind from a song a long time ago. As glaciers recede, they leave these other ecosystems behind, and I wanted this music to feel like the echoes of a piece that’s already happened.” 

The first single, “I Choose the Astronaut,” opens the album with rounded, warm, ascendant tones and was fittingly inspired by both a ‘70s documentary on outer space and something his daughter expressed to him about what she wants to be when she grows up. “Space is infinite—there’s so much to it, and yet there’s so much personal connection that still holds weight and value,” he says. “It’s about choosing to choose family in a world that seems really vast. The piece feels really cold, but it also has a warmth to it. The way the intonation plays out feels quite comforting and comfortable in a cold place.”

The glowy, floating “Phosphorescence” was inspired by an ocean documentary, its submerged flickers of melody conjuring images of luminous plankton in their underwater habitat; elsewhere, the sumptuous synthy swirls of “Shaky Camera at the Edge of the World” has a title that gestures to his Edge of the World home studio while pulling from core memories of a family fishing trip to Iceland when his oldest child was just 10 months old. “I was trying to remember that trip. and I was surprised at how much and how little I could remember,” Swindells explains while discussing what the track means to him. “It’s a piece about memory, and how even when you forget some things that you probably should forget, but you miss some things as well.” 

That notion of holding on to what’s special around us—of wielding memory and perspective to find the golden center of lived experience—is key to Swindells’ work, and In Our Wake is the greatest embodiment of that ethos that Swindells has produced to date. “A lot of Neighborhood Libraries is me exploring how to survive as a parent in this world that we live in now,” he says about what this record and the project currently mean to him as an artist and person. “As things have gotten crazier, I wanted to express the real fears that I have when it comes to raising kids and figuring out how we all fit in this world. But there’s also so much good and beauty in the world at the same time, and Neighborhood Libraries is designed to focus on that.”