Nashville-based pop-rock quartet Safari Room continues to evolve with its third studio album, Time Devours All Things, released in early 2024. The band’s nuanced sound, leavened with frontman Alec Koukol’s lyrics of catharsis, wielded an optimistic pop ambience on its 2020 debut, Look Me Up When You Get There. The following release, Complex House Plants, stayed on track and gained thematic maturity while venturing into emo territory, noticeably displaying a tighter band.
It’s this Walden of a third studio full-length from Safari Room that applies a more musically relaxed and exploratory nature to its songs’ choruses which, as pop evolution determines, makes this year’s Time Devours All Things the regional pop-rock album of the summer.
These guys can send a catchy pop-rocker into an ambient maelstrom, saturated with keyboard and guitar effects, still capable of dark-side ballads while mixing surf-rock-tinged riffs to mask any remnant emo tendencies in others. And, though lyrically traveling into the abysmal at some points, the album adapts a more honed Muse/Coldplay influence, allowing the band to stretch out into ambient jams and compensate for any of life’s digressions.
“A Promise to No One” (“technically the title track, even though it doesn’t share the same name”), mixes harmonies with an L.A. night beat-turned-ultimately uplifting youth-service concerto chorus that could comfortably last for days.
“Blunderbuss” offers a solid Hozier-influenced vocal style paired with a drum-driven vortex that offers drummer Austin Drewry a chance to pummel his way through dark, floor-tom-echoing back alleys of the song.
Continuing to navigate musical tropes, Safari Room finds its most comfy pop-rock niche in Time Devours All Things on “Broken Things,” a Vampire Weekend-tinged jam still housing traces of the Death Cab for Cutie and Beach House aesthetic of past albums, capturing the essence and energy of summer.
A somewhat understandable “mission statement” for the band at this point, “Phantom Limb” reflects Koukol’s journey of self-discovery as he grapples with his identity being wrapped up in Safari Room, being a musician and a workaholic—and when you strip all that away, who’s left? Finding definition through that when everything else goes away, Koukol confides I’m so lost without my phantom limb.
Time Devours All Things is radio-catchy musically, but lyrically, old men are still ashamed of their problems and young men take tremendous pride in things they’ve never done, as Koukol’s introspective writing highlights the paradoxes of life. It’s what you do when you can that makes differences that move this social economy along; it’s admirable that Koukol has found his love and outlet for expression, and extremely fortunate how they’re one and the same and backed by a group of friends.
It’s good to be grateful and to remember it’s funny how time changes the past—and yet the past stays the same. It doesn’t devour.
Find Safari Room’s Time Devours All Things across the icons at Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube, Tidal and Apple Music. For more on the band and upcoming show dates, visit safariroomband.com.
