Ty Segall - Possession

2025: YOLO. With the quickness, time’s still slipping into the future — so fast at times, you may think the end’s in sight up ahead, or that you’ve outrun the long trail of history behind. All that’s absurd, man. Take it from Ty Segall. He’s been on a few trips around the sun himself, making records in orbit as he charts his path forward. Modern life is here to stay, but also (to quote an old civil war scribe), everything rocks and nothing dies — so for Possession, Ty’s 16th album, he strikes up the orchestra in his head with an abiding view of some quintessentially American stories, a quest channelled into ten non-stop bangers. Because you gotta move — or something might be catching you!

A year and a half removed from the trenchant identity opus of his Three Bells song cycle, Ty’s beamed himself out from deep within psychic interiors. Hitting the trail beneath the big skies of our good ol’ frontier empire, he’s on the hunt for new horizons — and it’s frankly astonishing to hear, at this mature point in his discography, the discovery of invigorated new sonics around every bend. That’s simply what Ty does with his music. Here, compulsive rhythm arrangements are joined in battle by sweeping movements of strings and horns that further the charge righteously.

Be it de Toqueville, duBois, George H. Nash, Howard Zinn, Bob Dylan or Smile-era Beach Boys, it doesn’t matter where you get your history: whether you wanna party like it’s 1999 or 1699, the stories you like to tell yourself tend to reinforce what you already believe. But what if they didn’t? Here, coursing through the irresistibly high music spirits, Ty foists social concepts that you won’t read about in school. In the process, he manages to slip discreetly in and out of the ranks of silver-tongued bums, fly-by-nights and way-outs like Cheap Trick and Steely Dan, never tarrying long enough to retain their distinctive ordure.

One of the keys to this new music involved tapping an old friend and collaborator, filmmaker Matt Yoka, to write with him. As a non-musician, Matt’s language sense is different from the one Ty’s amassed as a player of music. With the trust they’ve developed over the years — brainstorming the visual worlds of Goodbye Bread, Manipulator, Emotional Mugger, and plenty more — they throw the conceptual ball back and forth to translate general vibes and feels into wicked lyric imagery, each acting as writer and editor in the process.

Through these lyric sets, Ty found new scansion and different shapes suggesting the qualities of the songs, and of an overall arrangement sense. That’s where the other keys came in — piano keys! Ty’s been woodshedding on the 88s, the 76s and/or the 61s; they add new outlines and shadings to the music, fortifying his fantastic plastic vision left and right. Rife with singing guitar leads and Wizzardian brass n’ reeds lustily riffin’ on the banks of Ty’s harmony vocal choir, Possession features some of Ty’s most inspired songs to date.

It’s a post–"Paradise City" map of the American way, moving and grooving, but not pointing fingers even as childish fantasies splatter across the windshield. Taking back alleys through complicated cityscapes, ripping riffs jaggedly out of past hits for a new purpose, Ty scans the wreckage scattered all around, singing about the end of the rope while resisting defeat — suggesting an ecstatic new empire to build as he cruises the countryside in his glittering craft.