Perennial has never needed much time to make a point. The Connecticut trio’s new album, Modernism, out now via Ernest Jenning, fits ten songs into twenty minutes — a self-imposed constraint that leaves little room for drift. On the heels of this year’s Perennial ’65 EP, the band compounds their interest in mid-century pop-art economy and proto-punk attack, pairing guitar, electric organ, and drums with production details that push beyond their stripped-down core.
Guitarist and singer Chad Jewett describes the tracklist as deliberately constructed. The opening title track, built from a lyrical collage of modernist poets and artists, was written as a showcase for organist and vocalist Chelsey Hahn. Despite its straightforward garage-rock architecture, the recording folds in fuzz bass, mellotron, electric piano, and drum machine — an approach Jewett says aims to keep experimental texture present even in the band’s most direct songs.
“Perennial ’65” signals the band’s reference points plainly. Jewett cites “Paperback Writer” as a starting point, down to the Epiphone Casino through a Vox amp, aligning the track with the Beatles’ mid-’60s edge. Lyrically, the song draws from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation, using its paranoia and surveillance imagery as a scaffold for fragmented, noir-tinted scenes.
The album arrives as a continuation rather than a departure — an extension of the band’s existing framework, pushed toward a more deliberate integration of texture and structure. At twenty minutes, Modernism isn’t brief by accident. It’s constrained on purpose.
