Since their 2013 self-titled debut, The Frights have embodied a carefree vulnerability,
setting their most awkward and painful feelings to a wildly joyful surf-punk sound. On
their fourth studio album Everything Seems Like Yesterday, the San Diego-based band
twist that dynamic to deliver their most emotionally direct body of work to date: a
collection of songs written and performed solely by Carnevale, each track matching its
stripped-back simplicity with both raw outpouring and intense reflection.
The follow-up to their 2019 album Live at the Observatory, Everything Seems Like
Yesterday first took shape through a handful of songs Carnevale wrote on acoustic
guitar back in fall 2018. “Hypochondriac was the first time I’d ever written that way, and
it felt really therapeutic,” he says, referring to the band’s 2018 Epitaph debut. “It pushed
me to get much more into the craft of songwriting—as opposed to mostly writing songs
for people to mosh to—and it felt right to keep going with that on this record.”
Although he originally intended to release that acoustic material as a solo album,
Carnevale had a change of heart upon sharing his new songs at a series of shows in
San Diego and L.A. “All the guys in the band came out and the response was pretty
positive, so I started to think this might be something more than a bunch of songs to put
online for free,” he says. Envisioning the album as a natural evolution for The Frights,
Carnevale soon enlisted Dotson as a producer, and the two bandmates set off to record
at Carnevale’s grandmother’s cabin in Idyllwild, California.
Kicking off with the sweetly offbeat folk of “24,” Everything Seems Like Yesterday
documents a particularly challenging year of Carnevale’s life—a period that began with
the release of Hypochondriac on August 24, 2018 (i.e., Carnevale’s 24th birthday). “A lot
of these songs are about friends who are gone now, either in the sense that they
passed away or that we don’t speak anymore,” Carnevale points out. “Our songs have
always involved some kind of looking back over the past, but this one feels like the first
time where I’m dealing with those situations and growing from them. I don’t want to say
it’s more mature—because I don’t know if I actually am more mature—but it feels a little
healthier than the songs where I’m more caught up in nostalgia, and wishing things
could just go back to the way they used to be.”
During their time at the Idyllwild cabin—a free-flowing but rigorously productive week in
late-April 2019—Carnevale and Dotson purposely laid down the entire tracklist to
Everything Seems Like Yesterday in exact sequence. In that process, they eschewed all
digital production methods in favor of using a field recorder to capture a wide array of
ambient sounds. “There were no plugins on the whole record; we wanted to force
ourselves to be as creative as we could,” Carnevale says. To that end, the two

musicians ended up relying on everything from pinecones to pots and pans to construct
the album’s percussive components, in addition to introducing such sonic elements as
the crunching of fallen leaves and the thump of tennis ball thrown against the cabin wall.
And while recording the beautifully untethered “Simple and Strange,” Carnevale found
his performance disrupted by an incoming call on the cabin landline—then left that
ringing in the track’s final version. (“Every time I go up to Idyllwild my dad will always
call to fuck with me—like, ‘I’m watching you...’, so we just figured it was him,” Carnevale
recalls. “But when we picked up the phone during that take no one was there, and we
never actually figured out who was calling.”)
With recording in sequence giving Carnevale the motivation to “make each song better
than the last,” Everything Seems Like Yesterday ends on the heavy-hearted but hopeful
“25”: a harmonica-laced number whose distinctly lo-fi aesthetic stems from some
trickery on Dotson’s part. “When I was done writing that one I told Richard to come
listen, and without telling me he turned on the field recorder—and that’s the take we
ended up going with,” says Carnevale. “So what you’re hearing on the album is the first
time I ever even played that song out loud.”
In creating the more starkly composed songs heard throughout Everything Seems Like
Yesterday, Carnevale made a point of placing a more careful focus on his lyrics, partly
drawing from his burgeoning love of poets like Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and
Sylvia Plath. “If you can read a song as a poem and still get the same feeling from it,
you know you’ve done something right,” he says. “I’m sure I have plenty of songs from
the old days that would really lack something if you took away the music and the
melody, but these new songs feel more connected to when I first started writing—back
before the main concern was mostly just trying to get people to dance.”
As they gear up for the release of Everything Seems Like Yesterday, The Frights are
building up the album’s tracks in order to accommodate the unhinged energy of their
live performance. But for Carnevale, the album will always maintain an undeniable
intimacy. “When this was going to be a solo record, I had it in the back of my mind that it
would really just be for my friends and my family,” he says. “And to be completely
honest, that’s still 100 percent what I want from this album. There’s a lot of stuff on there
that’s about things that people close to me have gone through, and in a way the songs
are just me trying to talk through them, and get a very personal message across without
really worrying about anything else.”