But Pastlife isn’t saddened, though; it’s full of hope and energy. For Jackson, as for most others stuck at home, the pandemic has been a time of “ceaseless looking backward,” trying to find his footing as a musician, years removed from the moving and shaking of touring and life. “With this record, it just feels like I’m stepping into this thing from my past,” says Phillips. “I started Day Wave when I was 25, and now I’m 32. I guess I didn’t really realise how much was going to change in that time.”

Some of those changes are routine, like the splintering off of friends into their careers and personal relationships. For Phillips, still a working musician, that meant a degree of alienation. But the deeper thread is the existential alienation created by the simple passage of time. “I kind of thought that being 25 was just going to stay like that forever, and then it didn’t,” he says.

The record wades through these complexities. “I think back to the times where you didn’t realise you were living in this exciting time,” continues Phillips. “At this point, there’s enough of those different chapters that I think back on them, like ‘Oh, when I lived in that apartment, when I was hanging out with those people,’ whatever it is. That became the whole vibe of the album: everyone around me is growing up, and I’m trying to figure out my own way of doing that I guess.”

The title track is one of those songs that captures that particular feeling of being happy and sad at the same time, the sound is absolutely mesmerising thanks to the different layers and how Phillips generates and places the backing vocals. Loner keeps this melancholy at its core, and somehow reminds us of The Days We Had, his excellent debut. His lo fi charm lives on, and we can hear a softer, poppier sound on tracks like Blue and We Used To Be Young. There is a reason why Phillips has become in only a few years a reference of the new DIY indie; he has created a generational sound, and his magnificent mastery as a producer guarantees the quality of the music we find on Pastlife.

The central acknowledgment of Pastlife: however desiring we are for the past, that feeling is matched in intensity by the impossibility of returning to it. What do we do with that conflict? If you’re Jackson Phillips, you go back to your past life, Day Wave, and make something new with it. Jackson kindly found some time to talk to METAL about this new record, touring, other collaborations and the perfect way to listen to Pastlife.