New Album Out Now From Anecdata
After spending 2025 working on a sprawling sci-fi concept double-album (Vita Brevis, Part 1 and Part 2), there had to be a reversion to the mean for Anecdata – as in mean guitars!
Wow. Terrible way to start a blurb, but in the spirit of the new album we’ll hit commit and just push on!
There’s Only Going Back Now is 11 tunes in the power-grungepop, new wave indie rock vibe of past Anecdata releases like Obsolete and If I Was PM…, but a big step up in the production and songwriting stakes.
Recorded at home in west Auckland between November and September 2026 (not to mention the usual adult demands of work, parenting, moving house and, err, time in hospital), TOGBN finds Anecdata channelling/borrowing classic Weezer blue vibes, with raw guitars fighting for space against piercing Moog and Odyssey synths. Heavy downtuned riffs pop in to say hi every now and then, but never get in the way of a Buzzcocks melody or Cars lead line.
Lyrically, the album takes aim at targets local, global and temporal – ancient Roman diaries, prime ministerial priorities, artificial intelligence and all-too-natural belligerence. Opening track Better Vampires (Dog and Pony Show) goes after a “lazy fuck” coasting on his “pale luck,” who’d rather have “the cushy job” than actually run the country.
Better Suggestions (Why Won’t You Just Die?) needs little explanation – it’s one of two songs that might be kind of/completely about a certain lame politician we’re all looking forward to seeing the back of. The Weatherman, meanwhile, swaps politics for the quieter melancholy (and relief) of living in a remote country.
Unlike a lot of modern albums which rely on digital perfection, most of the guitars on TOGBN were recorded the old-school way – pointing microphones at a cheap little solid-state Orange amplifier and hoping like hell they sounded good, because there was no way the microphones wouldn’t be knocked out of place by cats a couple of hours later.
Anecdata is the work of one guy, Dan, from writing to release and everything in between – all the lyrics, instruments, mixing and so on. And it’s all done from home in west Auckland, too. No big studios involved! No one else at all – mostly.
TOGBN features an amazing cover photo by Dan’s better half Tariqa, and stars their daughter Arabella and a weird-ass real cloud. It was taken in Bali in 2025. Yeah, it looks like something Pink Floyd would use – the second Dan saw it, he knew (if it fit nicely into a square) it had to be the cover.
The album captures a moment in time – yeah, AI is taking over, but for now it’s still possible to write down real human concerns, contort them into awkward rhymes and put them out there for the world to ignore. Who knows for how long.
Recorded November 2025-September 2026 at Sarona Studios (ie. home) in Auckland. For more behind each song’s writing and recording, here you go.
