THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “What is the price we pay for joy, and is it worth it? The thread of this question runs taut through The Fourth Wall’s new collection Return Forever, a fever dream of a record that unearths unresolved complexities of the immigrant experience in nine chapters. Throughout the album, songwriter Stephen Agustin circles a fire that feels so bright and yet so unknowable; there are not many answers to be found, only a disruption, the emergence of a world seen with new eyes.
Return Forever was first inspired by a moment in Agustin’s family history in which he learned that a close relative had left behind a young daughter when she moved to the United States, turning away from her past life and creating one anew. Shocked though he was, Agustin soon became fascinated with the idea of the “poetry of forgetfulness.”
“There was almost a way in which the impulse to revise or destroy history became a condition for achieving this joyous state,” he says. It was a theme he would begin to see over and over again: in the way he saw immigrant families assimilating into the United States, or in the way he saw his own parents — who were from Korea and the Philippines — harbor so little resentment towards America despite the traumatic history of war and colonization it has with those countries.
Lush, cinematic, and bold, The Fourth Wall paint the paradox of the exchange of joy for memory so perfectly. Driven by Agustin’s electric guitar soundscapes and the distorted, impassioned harmonies he shares with the band’s newest member Kendall Sallay, Return Forever is a journey that captures the unfathomable. It is hair-raising, powerful and gorgeous.
“My family history has always come to me in fragments and I’ve had the sense that there will always be an irreducible remainder that I will never have access to.” Agustin says. “I became interested in how this unintelligible past affects notions of my own identity.” In some ways, the record feels like a quest for this “irreducible remainder,” one that is futile by nature, but allows The Fourth Wall the opportunity to uncover so many stories that we should be listening to in modern day America. The record’s haunting opening, Interrupts the Dream zeroes in on the uncomfortable truths that were revealed at the height of pressurized xenophobia. Only the Joy, celebrates the tenderness of a mother who leaves her child to a more joyous life that doesn’t include her. Return Forever holds the darkness and the light together, until it is unclear where one ends and the other begins. Perhaps that is the only knowable truth.
Agustin grew up in Oahu, and was 10 when his musician father took him to a B.B. King concert. He quickly begged his parents for a guitar and soon started forming bands with his middle school friends. He played in various projects until the formation of The Fourth Wall, and eventually moved to Portland, where the band continued to find a growing audience while opening for acts such as The Shins, Andrew Bird, Menomena, Band of Horses and Typhoon. The Fourth Wall self-recorded Return Forever, beginning with recordings Agustin made in isolation during the pandemic. The record features Kasey Shun, Chris Lau, Kendall Sallay and Andrew White.”
