A single color or song can transport you instantly to the most joyful or tragic moments of your life, unlocking memories that don’t just live in the mind—they reside in the body, too. Phantogram’s fifth album, Memory of a Day, captures that uncanny sense of time travel. “We put these songs together as a capsule, thinking about how a certain sound or melody can bring you back instantly to a memory of a day,” the duo explains.
Though their music has always pushed forward, creating Memory of a Day meant looking back. “Recording this album felt like how it did when we first started making music together,” they reflect. Alongside special collaborators like Mikky Ekko and Dan Wilson, Phantogram reunited with producer John Hill—who helmed their second album, Voices. In the studio, they embraced experimentation, indulging in the music that first brought them together: J Dilla, Prince, Slowdive, and more. Traces of new wave pioneers Talking Heads, ESG, and Liquid Liquid emerge on “Feedback Invisible,” a percussive punk track, while the wistful “Attaway” swirls with lush shoegaze textures—“you can almost see the grain in the guitar sounds.”
The album’s penultimate track, “Happy Again,” is a bass-heavy, thrumming rock song with a chorus that crashes like waves against the shore. “Another empty summer sunset / Feeling homesick,” Barthel sings before the bridge, her voice weightless over luminous, breezy production. “Can you believe this is your life?” It’s a moment of reckoning that Phantogram likens to Forrest Gump’s bleak New Year’s Eve scene, where Lieutenant Dan—drunk and adrift—throws a joyless party. Yet the song refuses to sink into despair. As guitars careen and crash, Barthel repeats a simple, urgent mantra: “I can be happy again.”
If days are only numbers, how else can a person measure a life? On Memory of a Day’s closing track, “Ashes,” the answer seems to lie in resilience. Inspired by the adage, “You came into this world alone, and you’ll leave it alone,” its throbbing mix of trip-hop, shoegaze, and indie frames Barthel’s final words: “Ashes rise, ashes rise.”
Photos by Steve Sym from Phantogram’s performance at The Aragon Ballroom in Chicago on February 14, 2025.