Time distorts memory. A decade can feel like a blink, or a lifetime. But for Jakarta’s The Young Liars, it’s both. Their return with ‘Rêverie’, their first release in ten years, unfolds onto the scene, like smoke curling through a memory you’re not sure you want to revisit.
Built from a simple drum loop recorded back in 2017, ‘Rêverie’ is a song both rooted and adrift. There’s a hypnotic pulse to the rhythm section, anchored by a looping bassline that refuses to resolve. But it’s the guitar that adds shape to the dream: sparse, cinematic, flickering like distant headlights through fog. Each phrase lands with intention, but never overstays. It’s mood as melody, and melody as mood.
Then there’s the voice; half-restrained, half-ready to rupture. Sung in English and French, the lyrics feel like fragmented pages from a journal you wrote while half-awake. There’s confusion, yearning, and something unnameable. The line between emotion and recollection is thin here, and deliberately so.
What makes ‘Rêverie’ stand apart from their earlier work, particularly 2015’s ‘Rue Massena’, is its patience. Where the debut album leaned into a more urgent post-rock energy, this track simmers. It’s confident in its restraint, finding drama in the spaces between. You can hear the time it took to make this song, the years it spent being assembled, bit by bit. And rather than feeling disjointed, that slow creation has given ‘Rêverie’ a spark.
There’s something almost ghostly about the track. Maybe it’s the delay in its release, the years of hesitation, or the way it circles back on itself like déjà vu. Perhaps it’s just the unmistakable feeling that this is a song pulled from the ether.
The Young Liars have returned with a murmur that echoes longer than a simple bang. ‘Rêverie’ is about suspended time. It’s about picking up the pieces of a half-forgotten dream and asking if it still fits.
