Switchfoot Spent a Decade Drifting From Rock. 'Forever Now' Is the Hardest They've Ever Hit.

Switchfoot have spent more than a decade walking away from the thing that made their name. After Fading West in 2013, the San Diego band kept reaching for other rooms: the pop sheen of Native Tongue, the restless art-rock of interrobang, the occasional loud single dropped into an otherwise soft tracklist. Forever Now, out today on By Design Recordings/BMG, is the sound of a band remembering where the amps are. It is the heaviest, most guitar-forward record they have made since the Hello Hurricane and Vice Verses era, and it does not pretend otherwise.

The question underneath it

The album hangs on a single idea, and frontman Jon Foreman put it plainly when he announced the project back in March. "How would you live if you knew that today would be your last? What would matter most? What would be worth your time?" The opener and first single, "Wake Up, Mr. Crow," is built as an alarm clock for exactly that morning. Foreman has described the title character climbing into his car, fighting traffic, Radiohead and the Pixies leaking from the speakers, the noise outside mirroring the noise inside. "Paranoid Android" and "Where Is My Mind?" are not subtle reference points, and the song wears them on its sleeve.

That framing matters because it keeps the loud songs from being loud for nothing. Mortality runs through the whole thing, from the title (a phrase Foreman has reused from older Switchfoot songs "Afterlife" and "Where I Belong") down to a closer that literally circles back to the opening track.

What it actually sounds like

The band reunited with producer Mike Elizondo, who also worked on Hello Hurricane, and the lineage shows. The first two singles, "Wake Up, Mr. Crow" and "Absolution," open the record at full sprint. "Wake Up, Mr. Crow" spends a full 45 seconds on instrumentation before Foreman sings a word, which tells you the priorities up front. "Absolution" is the catchier of the two, a song about coming back to faith at your lowest, and it leans pop-punk in a way that recalls early Relient K more than late Switchfoot.

The clear centerpiece is "Shake the Dust." Critics calling it the hardest-rocking track in the band's catalog are not exaggerating for effect. Tim Foreman's bass drives it, the whole band locks into an actual jam before the bridge, and Chad Butler's drum fill into the final chorus is the kind of detail Switchfoot usually files down. "Same Blood" is the weird one in the best sense, a groovy, almost spooky rock cousin to "Wolves" off interrobang. "Ride or Die" is engineered for a festival crowd, all head-bob beat and a "ba ba ba" hook that will be sung back at them within a week.

Then there are the Switchfoot moves you expect. "Beautiful Life" is the anthem, the "Dare You to Move" of this record, the song built to be the closer of a thousand setlists. "YFWYA" (short for "You Forgot Who You Are") rides a surf-rock lilt. "Two Twins" turns a thought experiment, two babies in the womb arguing about whether anything exists after birth, into a blues-rock workout.

Where it wobbles

The risk on a record this committed to one mood is the pivot, and Forever Now has one. "Breaking Up Again" is a 90-second acoustic interlude near the end, Foreman essentially filing for divorce from himself, and it lands like someone hitting the brakes on the freeway. Thematically it follows "Two Twins" and the album's whole last-day premise. Sonically it is whiplash. Whether that read as a needed breath or a stumble probably depends on how much you came for the guitars.

The back stretch ("Darkness," "Broken Wings") is also where the energy cools before the finish, and a 13-track, 46-minute record built on momentum feels it a little when the momentum dips. These are small complaints about a record that mostly refuses to coast.

What saves the ending is the structure. Closer "The Butterfly Effect" pulls the riff back from "Wake Up, Mr. Crow" and has Foreman scream the opener's title near the end, the same bookending trick the band used on Hello Hurricane and Vice Verses. It gives the album a clean seal instead of a fade.

Where it sits

Early reviews are about as warm as Switchfoot gets. Jesusfreakhideout ran a five-star lead review calling it among the strongest records of the band's career, with two staff second opinions landing at four and four-and-a-half stars and both reaching for the same word: comeback. The consensus framing is that this is the band's best full-length since Vice Verses in 2011, and the hardest-rocking album they have ever made.

The timing is its own small story. Switchfoot make their Grand Ole Opry debut on July 23, an odd and fitting stage for a rock band that has always written like a folk one. Forever Now is the record that earns the trip. It is not a reinvention. It is a band that finally stopped apologizing for being good at the loud thing.