Imperial Teen’s releases over the past 20+ years have been pointed and specific diaries of musical celebration, windows into the hypersensitive personal drama of relationships within the band, individual conquests and failures, and collective, aspirational hopes, dreams, and perspectives. Roddy Bottum, Will Schwartz, Jone Stebbins, and Lynn Perko Truell—who they’ve become, how they are dealing, and what their lives are in 2019—all of this is on Now We Are Timeless. The band wrote and recorded the new album in the cities the individual members have geographically gravitated to: New York City, the Bay Area, Denver, and Los Angeles. Themes of time and movement, averting and succumbing to crisis, dealing with loss and pain are all represented on the record, but what rings triumphant is the undeniable joy and catharsis that come from the band’s spontaneous and improvisational approach to making music together. The juxtaposition of the title and the imagery of the cover of Now We Are Timeless takes us immediately to the heart of what Imperial Teen do best. By focusing on an element in the collective here and now—an iceberg in the midst of ecological crisis, clearly sinking, melting, disappearing, the absolute antithesis of timelessness—they pose the question of hope and beauty in the wake of age, a fading icon shining brightest in the final phase of its demise, exuding light and glory as the world falls apart. Now We Are Timeless indeed.