John Maus – Later Than You Think (Limited Blue Hour Edition)

In 2023 John Maus started writing for the first time since the mid-2010s – a song per week for 20 weeks. Each day, he descended to his basement studio to work on new music. Forty tracks later, Later Than You Think was ready to be chiselled into a record. The result is a return to form, 16 songs that break new ground while harkening back to the many stages of his career – the bare-bones synth-punk anomalies of 2006 and 2007’s Songs and Love Is Real, the lush avant-pop cuts from 2011’s We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, and, in a few cases, the symphonically ambitious endeavours of Screen Memories. Later Than You Think contains multitudes – the lush and the bare, the sacred and the profane, minimalist discipline and maximalist indulgence, counterpoint and simple pop harmony.