Over the past two decades, The Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaValle has known music as a daily pursuit. Each morning he enters his studio with a disciplined work ethic, balancing concrete objectives with the open-ended intention of simply writing something. On top of six solo albums and myriad other releases, the routine has amassed a vast library of experiments; he gravitates back to some, tinkering, building, refining, and putting aside again in a cycle of constant production. He last released a full-length album in 2016; NPR praised Between Waves, noting the “cinematic sprawl… an evocation of drama, loss and fraught emotional atmosphere,” and it’s no surprise in the time since LaValle has become prolific in the film scoring space. The techniques of soundtracking now influence how he writes, and the deadline-oriented nature of these projects was a welcome counterbalance to the more nebulous “next record.” As timelines stretched, ideas for LP7 surpassed two hundred demos, signaling styles, patterns, and pathways that could go in a dozen directions. FUTURE FALLING outlines one such sequence from the puzzle that stood out, ten striking arrangements coiling out of his hard drives and into the ether as a fluid, cohesive, and definitive set. FUTURE FALLING exhibits LaValle as emblematically inquisitive and renewed by outside perspectives. LaValle works with an array of other musicians, shaping melodic and meditative electro-organic music with contributions from Bat For Lashes, Kimbra, and many others. The music registers a shade darker and more synth-driven than most moments in his acclaimed catalog, a bridge between shadowy, cerebral terrain and dreamy precision pop, where softly percussive frameworks meet shimmering sound design and emotive instrumentation. LaValle sees The Album Leaf itself in cycles — spinning from solo outlet to full band and back in its nearly 25 years — and with FUTURE FALLING, he flourishes at a pivotal stage in the story, revealing an expanded sense of space.
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