There’s a moment on Word Gets Around—the new record by Longboat — where everything seems to hang in suspension. The synths stutter. The drums hold back. The voice almost cracks. And then it clicks into motion again—faster, sharper, more certain. That’s the rhythm of Longboat’s creative process. It doesn’t wait for the world to catch up.
For Longboat, music isn’t escapism—it’s confrontation. This album is soaked in that instinct. Themes of information overload, political fatigue, digital disconnection, and economic precarity thread through each track, but never in sloganeering ways. The messages are coded into structure, cadence, and tone. “Bare Minimum Society” doesn’t scream, it shrinks—and that’s its power. “Twilight of the Publicist” plays like an elegy for the middleman.
Originally a jazz saxophonist before turning to experimental pop full-time, Longboat has carved out an almost monastic existence in Seattle’s underground. Each album (32 and counting) is its own self-contained world. Word Gets Around, like the others, avoids the tropes that plague modern pop. No generic hooks. No love songs. No cinematic strings unless they’ve been deconstructed.
Even in its darkest moments—“Citizen Sweatpants” might be the best example—there’s humor. Dry, biting, precise. The kind of humor that comes from watching your culture collapse in slow motion and deciding to take notes instead of scream.
Longboat isn’t aiming for virality. He’s building a discography that resists easy consumption. Once describing love songs as “childish and silly when there’s literally a world of subjects out there,” he’s stayed committed to crafting music that matters. Word Gets Around proves that ethos still burns. Every track is a dispatch. Every lyric, a pressure point. Every album, a mirror.
